April was a good month in Germany. Passenger vehicle registrations jumped one fifth in Europe’s largest auto market. What did people buy? Mostly gasoline-powered cars, sales of the allegedly dead vehicles jumped 18.6% YOY. The second-best seller was hybrid cars, up a strong 26.4%. Battery-electric vehicles weren’t part of the party, BEV registrations flatlined at 0.2%.
For Tesla, April was a disastrous month. The proud owner of a factory near Berlin was down a gut-wrenching 32% YOY in April. Tesla moved only 1,637 units in the month, which landed them among the also-rans, out-sold by the dinosaurs Elon Musk vowed to disrupt.
“Come on, Schmitt,” Tesla’s keyboard warriors will type, “the first month of the quarter is always bad, sales usually erupt in the following quarters.” Not so fast. March sales were down even more, -55%. As a matter of fact, Tesla’s Germany-sales have been eroding for more than half a year.
In the beginning of 2023, Tesla could boast of triple, once even quadruple-digit growth rates. Going into the 3rd quarter of 2023, matters turned wobbly, and from November 2023 on, every month brought Tesla registrations much lower than in the same month a year ago. January through April 2024, Tesla’s Germany sales were down 32%. Exponential growth looks a bit different.
Four months into the year, Tesla landed behind Germany’s archetypical dinosaurs, namely the world’s oldest maker of ICEs, Daimler, and behind the company that built Hitler’s dream car, Volkswagen.
No wonder that Musk and his keyboard army are trying to shift Tesla away from an automaker, and more towards robots, and AI. Good luck with that.
[All data as per Germany’s regulator Kraftfahrt Bundesamt KBA.]
