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.
94% say they won’t buy a Tesla car
The rest are the AfD
AfD got 21% in the election though, higher than just 6%. I think it’s like someone else in this thread said - the right don’t want to buy Teslas because electric cars are seen as “woke”, while the left don’t want to buy Teslas because they don’t like Musk.
This is how we should treat all products and services coming from the US. Promote the European market for a stronger Europe. We have failed here in recent decades. Let’s buy EU products for a better future for our youngest.
Also services. Including Google, Apple, Netflix, Amazon, Microsoft, etc. Those American tech monopolies are now a problem for all to see.
If the Tesla board of directors was being responsible to shareholders, they’d have recognized the damage the public perception of Elon is doing to the company and either have him rein it in or outright remove him. However, Elon’s gotten a number of his cronies onto the board, so I don’t think it’s happening unless the shareholders vote out the current board.
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.
As someone from Northern California might not have been the greatest analogy :)
Looks like some elitist crap to me. Who the fuck buys the “best” especially in something like wine thats replete with elitist bullsit and nobbery to exagerate perceptions of scarcity and create an “investment”. its a fucking consumable.
99% of the people in France can get perfectly good French wine for a handful of euros without importing from USA.
Coudn’t give a fuck about the other 1%.
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.
yep, value for money.
Importing is a waste of diesel fuel even without any tariffs - if you have decent domestic production.
There are - sadly I won’t be buying any for at least 4 years and will be buying European.
The only way to get your money back is to set your car on fire these days
The option to drive it until it falls apart is still on the table though. A car shouldn’t be treated as an investment opportunity
Yeah but then you’d be stuck driving it for another couple weeks.
What a burn. The Tesla might even catch fire from this comment alone.
“Nazi-related gestures”
makes nazi salute
“Hitler did nothing wrong”
“Oh, he’s not a bad guy, he’s misunderstood.”
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Bonus points for irony if they actually use “aspergers” given the origin of the term.
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He did use that “Canada isn’t a real country” line from South Park. So you’re not far off.
Oh what an improvement, they actually mentioned the hate movement this time
I did notsee related gestures 🙄
I hope this is more than just a temporary movement!
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.
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.
94K=Nein
