Summary
A survey of 100,000 Germans found that 94% refuse to buy a Tesla, signaling a major crisis for the company.
Tesla’s German sales dropped 70% in early 2025 after a 41% decline in 2024, despite overall EV sales rising.
Analysts attribute the slump to CEO Elon Musk’s far-right political endorsements, including promoting the AfD party and making Nazi-related gestures. Musk is under European investigation for political meddling.
With Tesla’s reputation plummeting, industry experts predict further losses in Germany’s competitive EV market.
I hope this is more than just a temporary movement!
It is already dumb for a German to buy an American car. It is like a French buying an American wine.
As someone from Northern California might not have been the greatest analogy :)
Sadly our car industry slept way too long on electric vehicles and instead doubled down on combustion engines, even by fraudulent practices (e.g. Dieselgate).
Teslas were by far the best EVs for a long time. Nowadays, not so much.
Teslas were by far the best EVs for a long time
Were they though? Almost immediately after he stole the company from its founders/creators quality went down. But maybe there was enough residual quality to last him for a few years.
Anyhow, your point stands. Nowadays there’s plenty more to choose from and what then was innovative just isn’t anymore.
Okay, Elon Musk is a giant asshole, but not so big that it warps reality around it. Musk provided money and became chairman of Tesla in Jan 2004. The first production vehicle rolled out in 2005. All Teslas were produced after Musk joined Tesla. And while it could be argued that he did a hostile takeover of Tesla, usually theft doesn’t include piles of cash going to the victim.
I mean, it technically may be true, but that’s due to the complete lack of a viable competitor. Teslas are cheap, poorly made death traps. If you use auto pilot your basically being used as an unpaid crash test dummy. If you like being taken advantage of, then a Tesla is for you
There’s plenty of really good American wines.
But you can buy just as good and better wines cheaper and locally if you live in France.
nobody claimed otherwise
There are - sadly I won’t be buying any for at least 4 years and will be buying European.
“Nazi-related gestures”
I did notsee related gestures 🙄
That’s pretty wild considering the rise of AfD support there.
I wonder if Elon’s endorsement was a detriment to their election campaign.
AfD voters don’t care about the environment and the climate.
I mean AfD made it pretty clear they are against Tesla when trying to stop the Tesla plant in Germany.
Not sure how their brains work, maybe they don’t. 🤷🏼♂️
why? Elon supports AfD and I think he’s making it pretty clear that he’s against Tesla too
Well, they are afraid of electric vehicles, they want the good old polluting combustion engine.
I wonder if Elon’s endorsement was a detriment to their election campaign.
No, definitely not. But imho it didn’t shift the needle upwards either. They’ve been on the rise for a long time and there was no jump during this election.
But the next election in Europe might look different.
And there’s a lot more to be said about American-based social media and far-right populist movements influencing our own flavors of the same for many years now.
Neintyfour percent say no. Doesn’t this mean like most of AfD voters also say nein?
As I said in the other place this article was posted: the source seems to be an online reader survey from t-online.be. That means the scientific value of this is pretty low. For decent surveys, you need a random sample. In this case, you need to be a visitor of t-online, and you decide for yourself that you want to participate. That’s already enough to skew results. Add to that that there’s a lot of online activism against Tesla (for obvious reasons), so the poll could have been partly hijacked. Such a low number of people who don’t care or haven’t heard about Tesla going rogue is not realistic anyway. There’s a lot of people who are weird, contrarian or simply avoid all news.
Good point. I thought numbers were a bit too extreme.
Because they have been fed massive propaganda against EVs for years, they would never buy one anyway.
Vierundneunzig, bitte.
Since they got much more than 6% during the last election, and 82% of all people voted, yes.
Fourandneinzig. Entschuldigung für mein schlechtes Deutsch.
94K=Nein
People should really stop talking about Tesla. Everyone knows what a Tesla is, even people who can’t name any other car brand/model.
