The man in his twenties was arrested at around 5am and taken to a police station, the Lausanne city police told the Swiss News Agency Keystone-SDA in response to an enquiry.
It confirmed media reports about the damage to property. The shop window of the Tesla branch was sprayed with red paint, as photos on the internet showed.
Protests have been taking place outside Tesla stores in the US for several weeks. Critics of Tesla founder Elon Musk accuse the tech billionaire of attacking democracy with Tesla money.
Musk was one of the biggest financial supporters of Donald Trump’s election campaign last year. The richest man in the world, with an estimated fortune of around $320 billion (CHF280 billion), has also been working as an advisor to Trump’s government since the beginning of the year.
In Switzerland, the protest against Tesla does not yet appear to be a mass phenomenon. Only around 20 demonstrators gathered for a rally in front of the Tesla branch in Zurich on Saturday morning, as a journalist from Keystone-SDA discovered on site.
Translated from German by DeepL/ts
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