I disagree. He’s done enough that calling him a Nazi feels accurate to me. Or at least enough of a Nazi sympathizer that I totally support not doing business with him.

What I get frustrated by is justifying hurting the people that have his cars. Having a Tesla does not make one a Nazi sympathizer. You could maybe make the case that buying one today might, but even then I don’t think it’s justified attacking people for having a car.

If you want to be an extremist about it, hurt the dealerships and the company. Don’t go after people who are almost certainly not that different from you. The people keying cars just want to feel smugly superior to someone and feel morally justified for being an asshole, they don’t want to make anything better for anyone. If that’s how you act, you’re just a fascist with a slightly different ideology.

It’s not locked in such a way that only Tesla can do it, but it can be hard to find places that will service them. Especially smaller shops just don’t want to go through the hassle of figuring it out, and figuring out how to order parts and such, at least where I live.

Basically, it is going to depend on the shops near you and while Tesla doesn’t seem to actively prevent it I think they make it enough of a hassle for other shops that it may be true in some places that you can only rely on them for repairs.

It’s easier to shop for protocols and standards instead of brands. If you get a Zigbee dongle from Sonoff or SMLight and set it up with Home Assistant, 99% of devices marketed as Zigbee will work and you’ll know for a fact they don’t have Internet access and can’t really do anything that would be bad for your network security because that’s just not how the Zigbee standard works. This is where I would recommend starting.

If you plan on getting a lot of things, or think you might eventually, I would recommend getting both Zigbee and Zwave. There’s also Thread now but I don’t have much experience there yet. These are the standards that smart devices can use, with low power, to communicate without needing direct wifi access or anything. Each has their drawbacks in terms of how many devices you can use and their range. Again, this recommendation is only if you plan on going big at some point, but if you get zwave devices where you can, and focus on Zigbee for things like lighting, you’ll be able to blend the standards together and have less chance of running into interference or device limit problems. But here I’m talking about when you get over around 50 devices, if you don’t plan on doing that then it’s not really a concern.

When it comes to research, I would recommend reserving research time for the devices that have to be wifi. If you want cameras, for example, you’ll want to make sure you pick good ones that can be blocked from external access and properly secured. If you want to control a garage door or an appliance or something big like that, there’s much easier and cheaper ways than getting a smart appliance.

Smart home stuff is unfairly maligned. You just need a few basic rules and some hobby time.

• Don’t buy wifi stuff.
• If it needs its own dedicated app, don’t buy it.
• Don’t buy smart appliances. If you want to smart up something expensive, get a cheap smart outlet or a cheap sensor that does the job.
• Use an open source platform like Home Assistant, not Google or Alexa or whatever.
• When you find something it can’t do that you want it to do, write some Python code and make it open source. You’ll get so much love from the community for the simplest things. Also the occasional person that angrily wants to know why your free thing doesn’t support his hyper specific use case but you can safely ignore that.