Welcome to the Daily 5 report for Wednesday, March 19.
The proliferation of torched Teslas and vandalized stores is creating almost daily news coverage around the country as anger grows over Elon Musk's unprecedented U.S. government cost-cutting crusade for President Donald Trump. Last night, we learned about more vandalism at a Tesla facility in Las Vegas.
But if you want to see where the Musk backlash is really hurting Tesla, it's not from the vandalized electric vehicles that are presumably covered by insurance. It's from the undamaged Teslas gathering dust on dealership lots in blue states such as California and New York.
As our Tesla reporter, Laurence Iliff, wrote last week, Tesla's U.S. registrations slipped 11 percent in January, but a deeper look into S&P Global Mobility's data shows registrations plunged 31 percent to 15,018 in California — Tesla's traditional EV power base.
In New York, Tesla registrations fell 15 percent to 856. In Massachusetts, they fell 19 percent to 450 registrations.
On the political flip side, Tesla registrations are rising in red states such as Texas, where the company is headquartered and where registrations surged 28 percent to 5,148 in January, according to the S&P Global data.
Ultimately, Tesla and Musk have been hurt most on Wall Street, where Tesla shares plunged from a December high of $488.54 to the $235 range in recent days, costing Musk an astounding $130 billion in paper losses year to date. But he's still the world's richest human, with $303 billion in net worth, according to Bloomberg.
It all begs this question: Could anyone ever imagine that an automaker's financial success could rest on the politics of its CEO?
Another story nobody could have imagined years ago? Amazon.com selling cars online. Today's story by Carly Schaffner details Amazon's next bold plan to expand into used cars.
Also from the auto retail world, Trump fired both Democratic commissioners at the Federal Trade Commission, Reuters reported. A White House official confirmed the firings of Commissioners Alvaro Bedoya and Rebecca Kelly Slaughter but had no additional comment.
Car dealerships are heavily regulated by the FTC for their sales and marketing activities. Time will tell if these moves will translate into an FTC that becomes friendlier with auto dealers.
Meanwhile, Mercedes-Benz has launched a pilot project with humanoid robots that it says could begin working alongside assembly line workers in the next five years, according to this story from Automotive News Europe.
During a Mercedes presentation at its plant in Berlin, a white, stick-like robot named Apollo greeted reporters by waving its hands before performing some simple tasks to show its skills. "Around 2030, we will see at least some humanoid robots in production," Mercedes production boss Jörg Burzer said in our story by William Boston.
The move toward humanoid production robots in auto plants is real. Hyundai, Honda, BMW and others also are experimenting with this game-changing technology.
Finally, the ongoing development of robotaxis is moving ahead with predictable hiccups. Reuters reported today that Amazon's Zoox robotaxi unit is recalling 258 vehicles for unexpected braking. Zoox is fixing the issue with a software update.
That's it for now. Have a great rest of your day.
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— Philip Nussel, online editor
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