South Korean automaker Kia has told news agency AFP it did not approve the advertising campaign from its Norway business wherein bumper stickers on its EV3 electric vehicles disparaged Elon Musk.
“I bought this after Elon went crazy,” read the stickers. They first came to light after Kia Norway posted screenshots of them on its social media accounts.
“Kia Corporation is aware of a social media post by Kia Norway, which has since been removed,” a company spokesperson said in a statement provided to AFP. “The post was an entirely independent local initiative that does not reflect the position of Kia Europe or Kia Corporation,” it added.
Musk, the man behind Tesla and SpaceX and the owner of X (formerly Twitter), has faced widespread criticism after he started to lead the Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) which demanded spending cuts from various US government departments.
Recently X suffered a global outage which Musk termed as an “cyberattack”, while Tesla sales are on a downward slump. “Tesla has lost more than one-third of its market value since mid-December as Musk deepens his association with the polarising U.S. leader,” wrote Fortune when it reported on the Kia anti-Musk ad.
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