Can you spot the Tesla on the chart of April BEV registrations in Germany? Read the fine print: Tesla managed to sell all but 885 units in Europe’s largest auto market, that’s nearly half of what Tesla moved in April 2024. What’s worse (and mostly overlooked in the media) Tesla’s Jan-April Germany sales are down a whopping 60.4%, pulling the rug from under the usual argument that Tesla’s first month of the quarter usually sucks: All four months of German Tesla sales sucked big. Also, those pent-up registrations of the refreshed Model Y, predicted as the antidote for flagging sales, don’t seem to be happening.
Are Tesla’s sales down because Germans have turned BEV-averse? The opposite is true: German BEV registrations rose a massive 53.5% YOY, reports Germany’s regulator Kraftfahrt Bundesamt. A rising tide should lift all boats, except when they are under water. Tesla, a company operating an alleged “gigafactory” outside of Berlin, has been out-BEVed by most “legacy” OEMs, even by China imports of BYD and SAIC. And it’s not just Germany turning on Tesla. Tesla sales have gone miserable all over Europe. Even in Tesla’s adopted home-market China, “Tesla’s China-made electric vehicle sales fell 6% in April from a year earlier, extending declines for a seventh month, as the U.S. automaker grapples with intense competition from its Chinese rivals and a tarnished image in Europe,” Reuters writes.
Gone are the days when Tesla fans were proud of their best-selling Model Y. Now in Germany, 9 out of the Top 10 best-selling BEVs are Volkswagen Group models, led by the Volkswagen ID.7, the ID.3, and the ID.4/ID.5. Sure, the Y still is Tesla’s best-selling model, but it sold only 639 units out of a Tesla-total of 885. All hopes of Tesla fans were pinned on the Model Y, but it is not a sales-savior, it is a bust. On the German April BEV best-seller charts, the Y landed on Rank 25 (!!!!) behind such famous BEV brands as the electric Fiat 500, the Hyundai INSTER, and the battery-operated Opel Corsa.
In the first four months of the year, Tesla has reached a German BEV market share of only 3.7%, forget the days when their share was in the double digits. Pretty much half of the German BEV market is dominated by Volkswagen Group, the same automaker Tesla fans had predicted to be in rusty ruins by now. What is in ruins instead are Tesla’s sales, a victim of Elon Musk’s brand destruction and right-wing fanaticism.
