Elon Musk Will Bankroll Republicans In The Midterm Elections

Good morning! It’s Monday, April 28, 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 checking out how Tesla CEO Elon Musk plans to bankroll Republicans in the upcoming midterm elections and what Nissan is doing to skirt import tariffs on its most popular model. We’re also looking at Tesla’s price hikes in Canada and some good news for the best-selling vehicle in Europe.

We’re starting this week off with a bang, folks.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has seen what donating millions to Republican candidates has done to his and his automaker’s reputations and decided that wasn’t done yet. The billionaire is apparently laying the groundwork to be a Republican megadonor in the 2026 midterm election. The news comes about a week after reports that he was pretty much done with his whole DOGE project after not really doing much of anything other than making people’s lives worse. Reuters spoke with four anonymous sources who are knowledgeable on the matter.

Still, Musk plans to remain influential with Trump as a political advisor while investing millions in Republican candidates running in next year’s election. From Reuters:

After overseeing job cuts at nearly every federal agency while leading the Department of Government Efficiency, Musk told investors last week that he would reduce his time with DOGE to a day or two a week from May. As a special government employee, he can only serve for 130 days, a period that will expire at the end of May.

“I think he’s exhausted and exasperated, especially with the attacks on his companies,” said a third person who has knowledge of Musk’s efforts at DOGE. By “stepping back, you make yourself less of a target.”

Musk’s political meddling has been a nightmare for the reputations of both Musk and Tesla. Since he’s a man who clearly very much wants people to like him, this has got to sting.

Tesla has faced a troubling few months. The once-leading electric vehicle brand has been tarnished by protests against Musk’s far-right politics. Tesla vehicles have been vandalized. Deliveries of its aging vehicle lineup have nosedived. And its stock price has tumbled, prompting some investors to publicly urge Musk to exit politics.

Public disapproval of Musk, a former Democrat, has surged. Some 58% of respondents in a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted this month had an unfavorable opinion of Musk. In 2022, his disapproval ratings hovered in the mid-30s, opinion polls showed. 

From the looks of it, Musk’s political sway with folks outside of Washington seems to be waning quite a bit. After spending millions on a Wisconsin Supreme Court election earlier this year, the candidate Musk backed lost by 10 points. Voters seemed unswayed by Musk’s icky ways.

It was also a bit of a tail-between-the-legs situation. After that gnarly defeat, Musk quieted down a bit about his political dealings — taking a slightly lower profile inside the White House, a place he’s increasingly not welcome.

Nissan is set to boost U.S. production of its Rogue compact crossover by 56% to get around tariffs on imported vehicles put in place by the Trump administration. According to a memo, the Japanese automaker is now planning to build 172,533 Rogues at its plant in Smyrna, Tennessee during the fiscal year ending on March 31, 2026. That’s a 62,164 vehicle increase over its pre-tariff forecast.

The increase in Smyrna will come at the expense of Nissan’s factory in Kyushu, Japan, which also builds the Rogue. It’s also a big reversal of course from Nissan’s plans earlier this year. It was planning to build a larger portion of its next-generation Rogue in Japan to keep prices down. Well, you can kiss that idea goodbye. From Automotive News:

Nissan now plans to capitalize on current geopolitics to stem the hemorrhaging at its two Southeast U.S. factories amid a sales slump in recent years.

Production in Smyrna and Canton, Miss., dropped 13 percent last year to 525,583 vehicles as Nissan cut production several times to manage an oversupply of key models, including the Rogue crossover and Frontier pickup. That’s only about half as many vehicles as the two factories have the capacity to build.

Rogue production will crank up in June as Nissan maintains a second shift at Smyrna that it had planned to eliminate.

Earlier this month, Nissan cut the sticker price of the 2025 Rogue and Pathfinder by about $1,000 to entice more buyers. In an effort to hit 300,000 U.S. sales, the automaker is also planning to repackage the Rogue to include more popular features in more entry-level trims. It’s also planning to introduce a plug-in hybrid version of the car. 

Sales of the Rogue have fallen 40% since peaking at over 412,000 units back in 2018.

Tesla is raising prices in Canada and pushing hard for shoppers to buy cars imported before Canadian counter-tariffs were imposed on U.S.-made vehicles. The Austin, Texas-based automaker’s Canadian website apparently shows a banner that says “Explore pre-tariff priced inventory while supplies last.” From Bloomberg:

After President Donald Trump imposed sweeping tariffs on Canadian goods last month, including 25% on vehicle content produced outside of the US within a US-Mexico-Canada trade pact, Canada announced retaliatory import taxes. Those in-kind levies are designed to mirror the US duties.

Pricing for new orders on Tesla’s site as of April 26 was higher than for the same models listed as being in inventory. For example, the sticker price of long-range Model 3 cars with all-wheel drive was listed as C$79,990 ($57,700) for a new order, but those same 2025 model year vehicles already in inventory were being offered for around C$69,000.

Prices are going up by double digits across the board. The Model Y Long Range will see a 21% increase, the Model X AWD and Model 3 Long Range will get a 16% price hike, the Model S will see prices rise 17 percent and the Cybertruck AWD will get a gnarly 22% price jump. Ouch.

This is almost certainly going to severely hurt Tesla’s sales in Canada, especially because of everything going on with CEO Elon Musk. Canadians are none too pleased with the fact he’s so strongly backed President Trump, a man who has been disparaging Canada and saying he wants to make it the 51st U.S. state since he took office back in January.

The Dacia Sandero is now the best-selling vehicle in Europe, narrowly edging the second-place Peugeot 208 by just 85 sales in March. Dacia registered 25,402 Sanderos last month in Europe, just ahead of the 25,317 208s that Peugeot sold over the same time period. Coming in third was the Nissan Qashqai crossover, which was just 247 sales behind the 208. From Automotive News:

The top 10-sellers were locked in a tight race, with just over 6,000 sales separating the Sandero from the 10th-placed Peugeot 2008 small SUV.

[…]

The biggest movers in the top 10 for the month were the VW Tiguan, which added a new, long-range plug-in hybrid system at the end of 2024, in seventh place with sales up 23 percent, and the Opel/Vauxhall Corsa, a sibling model to the 208 that was up 8.3 percent. The 208 itself was up 7.1 percent.

[…]

Several key models have fallen out of the top 10 in recent months: The Tesla Model Y was 19th in March (-42 percent), in part because of a changeover to a face-lifted version, but also because of backlash to CEO Elon Musk’s political activities. The Citroen C3 fell to 17th (-23 percent) because of software-related delays to ramping up the new generation.

Through the first quarter of 2025, the Sandero was ranked number one with 68,707 sales — about 10,000 more than the Peugeot. The Volkswagen Golf finished up the top three.

The Sandero’s sales crown came despite the fact its deliveries dropped 3.8 percent in March. James May’s influence knows no bounds.

On this day in 1988, an Aloha Airlines Boeing 737 lost an 18-foot-long section of its upper fuselage while flying from Hilo to Honolulu. Somehow, just one person — a flight attendant who was sucked out of the cabin — died. Here’s more from History.com:

The bizarre incident happened about 20 minutes into the flight from Hilo International Airport to Honolulu, at 24,000 feet with 95 passengers and crew members on board. The 300-m.p.h. wind was so noisy that the pilots had difficulty communicating in the cockpit, and flight attendants couldn’t get into the cockpit to see if they were even alive. Passengers under the missing roof had no access to oxygen tubing and became incapacitated by hypoxia.

[…]

Captain Schornstheimer began an emergency descent into Kahului Airport on Maui, flying the crippled jet over mountains to get there. Passengers later interviewed felt certain they would die, but the captain successfully made the landing after flying 13 terrifying minutes in the damaged aircraft.

[…]

A National Transportation Safety Board investigation determined that the airline’s maintenance crew did not detect significant disbanding and fatigue damage on the plane’s skin lap splice. As a result of the crash, Congress passes the Aviation Research Act, which increased FAA oversight.

If you haven’t watched the new season of “Love on the Spectrum,” stop whatever you’re doing and open up Netflix. There are few pieces of media in the entire world that’ll make you feel as happy as this show will make you feel.