A Florida man has been charged with assault for driving his car toward a group of people who were peacefully protesting outside a Tesla dealership in West Palm Beach on Saturday. Witnesses said the man, who claimed to be an employee of the West Palm Beach Tesla showroom, drove his black Nissan SUV onto the curb toward around 100 protesters, the Palm Beach Post reports. "He drove into a crowd of senior citizens," says Mark Offerman of the Democratic Progressive Caucus Palm Beach County, one of the groups that organized the protest. "Everybody was able to move out, but two older women were really almost clipped. We immediately called the cops."
Court records show that Andrew Dutil was charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon without intent to kill. NBC News reports that Dutil has shared pro-President Trump content on Facebook, though he also criticized electric vehicles in 2022, saying, "If you drive one, welcome to 1995 where the technology of your car is from." The Democrat Progressive Caucus says it plans to hold protests at the same dealership every Saturday. "Elon Musk is destroying our democracy, and he's using the fortune he built at Tesla to do it," the group says.
In Texas, meanwhile, police in Austin, home to Tesla's headquarters, say multiple "incendiary" devices were found at a Tesla showroom Monday morning, CNBC reports. Police say the bomb squad was called in and the devices "were taken into police custody without incident." After multiple attacks on dealerships last week, Trump warned that people vandalizing Teslas could face long prison sentences. "I look forward to watching the sick terrorist thugs get 20 year jail sentences for what they are doing to Elon Musk and Tesla," he said in a Truth Social post. "Perhaps they could serve them in the prisons of El Salvador, which have become so recently famous for such lovely conditions!" (More Tesla stories.)
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