When Yu Xinquan took delivery of his Tesla Model S, he promptly grabbed a wrench and bashed in the windshield to make some kind of point. Yes, this is actually a thing in China.
"It's a protest against the company," Yu told reporters coincidentally on hand. "Tesla's arrogance made me angry."
According to the Wall Street Journal, Yu was the leader of a group of angry Tesla customers that, like Veruca Salt, wanted their cars NOW. They led a protest in April, the day before deliveries began in China, and Tesla agreed to meet with the mob, which even got an audience with Elon Musk who apologized for the delay.
That apparently wasn't enough for Yu, leading him to smash the windshield (not the body, mind you) of his brand-new one million yuan ($173k) Model S before snapping photos of the destruction and sending them out to a variety of Chinese media outlets.
These kind of publicity stunts aren't out of the ordinary in China, but an owner doing it himself is.
In 2011, a Lamborghini owner had his Gallardo beat into tiny little bits by a mob after a service update didn't solve a technical problem. Two years later, a Maserati Quattroporte owner did the same thing at the Qingdao Auto Show to protest a dealership. In both cases, the media was on hand and the sledgehammer-wielding consumer advocates were hired by the owners to do the deed.
As for Yu, his motives are even less clear, although the "e-commerce entrepreneur" has promising future in the nose removal business.