Elon Musk To Cut DOGE Work To Nearly Half His Waking Hours

Good morning! It’s Wednesday, April 23, 2025, and this is The Morning Shift, your daily roundup of the top automotive headlines from around the world, in one place. This is where you’ll find the most important stories that are shaping the way Americans drive and get around.

In this morning’s edition, we’re talking about where Tesla CEO Elon Musk spends his time and attention, as well as the auto industry’s warnings to President Trump over tariffs. Plus, a California dealer group is suing Tesla over direct Scout sales, and India is weighing lowering tariffs on Harley-Davidsons.

Elon Musk has spent a good chunk of his time recently on the Department of Government Efficiency, the federal version of those two chainsaw consultants from “Office Space” — two men Musk apparently personally looks up to, for reasons incomprehensible. But Musk’s investors in Tesla are concerned that this whole “disassembling the federal government” thing might be taking too much of his time away from running the car business, a fear he did his best to assuage on last night’s investor call. From Reuters:

The move comes as Musk’s involvement in the so-called Department of Government Efficiency – where he has led efforts to cut federal jobs – has become a political lightning rod, fueling unrelenting protests and vandalism at Tesla showrooms. Investors have raised concerns about Musk spending too little time managing Tesla, where sales have nosedived.

“The large slog of work necessary to get the DOGE team in place and working with the government to get the financial house in order is mostly done,” Musk told analysts on a conference call. But he said he still intended to spend some 40% of his time on DOGE.

Musk will spend 40% of his time on DOGE, but we can assume that’s 40% of waking hours rather than all the time in his life. That leaves the remaining 60% to be split between Tesla, SpaceX, The Boring Company, Twitter, XAI, Neuralink, and relentlessly posting on X. Surely, he has a reasonable amount of time and attention to devote to all of these individually. 

The Trump administration has placed 25% tariffs on auto parts, a move that has American automakers terrified. So terrified, in fact, that they’ve banded together to send a letter to the White House asking if Trump could, in fact, not do that. From the Detroit Free Press:

“Tariffs on auto parts will scramble the global automotive supply chain and set off a domino effect that will lead to higher auto prices for consumers, lower sales at dealerships and will make servicing and repairing vehicles both more expensive and less predictable,” said the letter.

“Most auto suppliers are not capitalized for an abrupt tariff-induced disruption. Many are already in distress and will face production stoppages, layoffs and bankruptcy,” the letter added, noting “it only takes the failure of one supplier to lead to a shutdown of an automaker’s production line.”

It’s usually hard to empathize with corporations that spend their money on executive bonuses rather than saving up to keep their workers employed during rough times, but I can understand how this one came out of left field. Trump has long loved tariffs, but generally in the context of (to his mind) protecting American businesses — not making them pay more for supplies. 

Volkswagen’s revived Scout brand plans to cut dealers out of the car-selling process, a plan liked by pretty much everyone but the dealers. So, of course, the dealers are pushing back. Now Volkswagen’s California dealers are getting in on the festivities, with a new lawsuit that aims to force VW to let dealers in. From Automotive News:

The lawsuit, filed April 21 in Superior Court of California, San Diego County, is the latest development between one of the nation’s most powerful and influential dealer associations and Scout. The lawsuit also names Volkswagen of America and Volkswagen Group of America as defendants.

…

The lawsuit says Scout’s direct-to-consumer model violates a California law that was amended and took effect Jan. 1, 2024. The dealer association considers Scout, wholly owned by Volkswagen AG, to be an affiliate brand of VW. The amended law requires affiliated brands to use franchises to sell and service vehicles, the lawsuit says.

Dealers add little but frustration to the act of buying a car, so it makes sense that they’d turn to the law to mandate their admission. No one wants them there, but everyone might just be forced to take them. Surely there is no better way to go about your business than this. 

India is a tough automotive market to break into, largely due to protectionist tariffs that insulate the country’s own automotive industry. India is also very big on two-wheeled transportation, meaning the country could end up a hotspot for brands like Harley-Davidson — if not for that pesky first point. So, as a way to ease trade war tensions, India is considering letting Harley in. From Bloomberg:

The Narendra Modi-led administration is mulling a proposal to scrap import duties on motorbikes with engine capacity of 750cc or more, according to people familiar with the internal discussions who did not want to be identified. There’s no certainty this offer will be part of the final US-India trade pact and it depends on the tenor of the talks, they added.

The offer aims to tear down tariff barriers largely for the iconic American bike maker Harley-Davidson Inc. and will expand on India’s budget-time concessions when duties on motorcycles up to 1600cc were slashed to 40% from 50% earlier. The market for such high-capacity motorcycles in India is a tiny fraction of the nearly 16 million units sold every year, making this concession relatively painless for the local industry.

Whether Harley would actually do well in India, a country that loves small, cheap motorcycles, is an open question. A big cruiser over there is something like the Royal Enfield Super Meteor 650 — a bike with all the looks and chrome of a Harley, but with less displacement and for much less money. Would such big, expensive bikes work over there?

This is the first YouTube video, from 20 years ago today. Before anyone could make it a career, before its algorithms influenced the political landscape, back when it was just a website that you could use to share videos with your friends. How did it all go so wrong?

They should make cigarettes that are good for you.