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.
It is already dumb for a German to buy an American car. It is like a French buying an American wine.
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.
There’s plenty of really good American wines.
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”
makes nazi salute
“Hitler did nothing wrong”
“Oh, he’s not a bad guy, he’s misunderstood.”
“He has aspergers”
I swear, this time-line seems right out of a South Park episode.
Best justification so far: he was just so happy, so in the moment!
🤔 When’s the last time you made an “accidental” Heil Hitler just because you were pumped about something?
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.
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. 🤷🏼♂️
AfD voters don’t care about the environment and the climate.
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.
Well, they are afraid of electric vehicles, they want the good old polluting combustion engine.
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.
People should really stop talking about Tesla. Everyone knows what a Tesla is, even people who can’t name any other car brand/model.
94K=Nein
