Elon Musk (center), Tesla’s CEO, stands with Tesla’s vice president of sales Robin Ren (left) and Shanghai mayor Ying Yong (right) during an event at the site of the company’s manufacturing facility in Shanghai, China, in Jan. 2019. After four years of planning, Tesla finally broke ground on its planned $5 billion factory in the world's biggest auto market. Credit: Qilai Shen/Bloomberg via Getty Images
On April 18, in a crowded showroom at the 2021 Shanghai Auto Show, a 32-year-old woman from Henan province named Zhang Yazhou climbed onto the roof of a raspberry-red Tesla Model 3 and began to scream. As onlookers turned their attention from the glitzy new cars, Zhang made an accusation that no automaker wants trumpeted: “Tesla’s brakes are not working! Tesla’s brakes are not working!” Her t-shirt and that of another woman standing nearby repeated the claim, which referred to a near-fatal accident Zhang and her father suffered in a Model 3 in February.
Video of the incident flared across the Chinese internet. Soon it was international news. “Protesters upstage Tesla at China’s top auto show,” said CNN. Although Tesla quickly framed the incident as nothing more than a single act of lunacy, many observers declared it the inevitable first crack in Tesla’s China dominance. “Tesla’s China honeymoon appears to be coming to an end,” wrote a Bloomberg reporter. &
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