You’ll never find crossover buyers blackballing the C5 X because they’ve taken a dislike to Citroën’s Thierry Koskas. Who even knows Koskas is the Citroën boss (not me; I had to look it up), let alone what his views on politics, gender or recreational drugs are? We expect him to get on with building cars and to keep the hell out of our lives.

But when it comes to signing the next three years away on a new Tesla it’s not just the Model 3’s bonkers indicator switches and the Y’s concrete-tyres ride that might persuade you to walk away. It’s all the other Elon Musk-related baggage that goes with it. Plenty don’t care; but many do. And the man is so omnipresent, he’s impossible to avoid.

Is Musk really so bad, though? He’s undoubtedly achieved amazing feats and is certainly not the only car boss ever to hold questionable views. Elon might have ruined Twitter and allowed odious racists to spew their hate-filled opinions, but at least he’s only personally promoted the occasional anti-semitic conspiracy theory. Henry Ford devoted years to the pastime.

Ford was by far the biggest single employer of black workers in Detroit in the early 1920s, but he hated Jews so passionately that he bought up his local newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, and pumped it full of anti-semitic nonsense for 92 issues. He even collected the offensive articles claiming Jews were responsible for all the world’s ills into four bound volumes, which were distributed to dealers around the US.

Some of those articles made their way over to Germany, where they found a fan in Adolf Hitler, who pictured ‘Heinrich Ford’ as the ‘leader of the growing fascist movement in America’.

Ford even accepted an honour, the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, from Nazi high-ups in 1938 and the company bearing his name had no problem building military trucks for the Nazis and used slave workers in its German plants to do it. Back home, Henry’s opposition to unionisation – a stance shared with Elon Musk – must have made American workers feel if not exactly enslaved, then at least undervalued.

Though Hitler only admired Henry Ford from afar, things were much cosier between Adolf and another famous car boss. Ferdinand Porsche didn’t only design Hitler’s KdF (strength through joy) Wagen, the car we know as the Beetle. He was a member of the Nazi party and gave up his Czechoslovak citizenship four years before the Germans invaded.

Porsche and his son, Ferry, an honorary SS officer, also ripped off Adolf Rosenberger, one of three co-founders of the Porsche business along with Anton Piëch, paying him a fraction of the true value of his stake in the firm and getting away with it because Rosenberger was a Jew. And to rub salt in the wound Ferry even falsely claimed years later that he’d personally helped free Rosenberger from prison and suggested his attempts to get what he was rightly owed were the actions of an opportunistic money-grabber.

Eighty years later, it wasn’t Jewish shareholders being cheated by the company that evolved from Porsche’s original Beetle, but emissions regulations around the world. VW Group engineers had worked out how to get an engine to recognise it was undergoing an emissions test and be on its best behaviour. Think belching, foul-mouthed teen’s temporary transformation to golden child the moment he’s introduced to his best friend’s mother.

The ruse came to light in 2014, but prosecutions of those deemed responsible are still rumbling through the courts. Former Audi chief Rupert Stadler received a 21-month suspended sentence and a fine of €1.1 million (£940,000) for fraud by negligence last year; Martin Winterkorn, CEO of the VW Group parent company at the time, is still awaiting trial. His ill health has prompted the trial’s postponement to next year.

We may never truly know if they were aware of the cheat devices, but we can be fairly sure that Ralph Mason, chairman of GM-owned Opel in the late 1960s, would have been oblivious if it had been happening on his watch.

In Icons and Idiots, Bob Lutz’s often hilarious tale of the good and terrible leaders he’d encountered throughout his life and career, Mason is revealed as a raging alcoholic who’d been shuffled off to Europe by GM brass in Detroit to avoid him and his equally sozzled wife embarrassing The General on home turf.

Lutz – who also caused red faces at GM when he referred to global warming as a ‘crock of shit’ while he was global product chief – recalls Mason getting so mashed at his first major dinner with Opel dealers that two other execs had to drag the unconscious 6ft 3in CEO out of the room, ‘his expensive wingtip shoes, toes down, scraping along the flagstone floor.’

Still, at least Mason’s vice wasn’t the kind to get vice cops excited. Not like John Zachary DeLorean’s apparent enthusiasm in 1982 for a $6.5 million cocaine deal that he allegedly saw as a last-ditch attempt to secure funds to rescue his flatlining car company.

He was later cleared after judges ruled that he’d been entrapped by the government, but that was hardly the only scandal to engulf the one-time GM golden boy. DeLorean was implicated in the disappearance of millions of pounds of British government money, which was supposed to go to Lotus for development of the DMC-12, but was believed to have lined the pockets of John Z, Lotus boss Colin Chapman and Lotus accountant Fred Bushell.

Bushell eventually copped to snaffling £5 million and spent three years in jail, but the trial judge in that 1992 case claimed Chapman had only escaped a 10-year sentence for his role by virtue of having died a decade earlier.

We haven’t even got to Carroll Shelby’s shady continuation Cobras or Mercedes boss Jurgen Schrempp’s nightmare Daimler-Chrysler tie-up, but there’s clearly enough dirt and disaster in car-maker boardrooms throughout history for us to be sure that however brilliant – but occasionally unappealing – Elon Musk is, he’s in bad company.