Feb. 5, 2025, 12:20 p.m. ET11 minutes ago
Melissa Eddy
Reporting from Berlin
Tesla loses customers in Europe as Elon Musk disrupts politics there.
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A Tesla showroom at an auto show in Munich in 2023. The company’s sales have been sliding there.Credit...Felix Schmitt for The New York Times
Tesla’s sales in Germany plunged 59 percent in January, the month when Elon Musk, the company’s chief executive and a close adviser to President Trump, chided Germans for focusing too much on “past guilt” for Nazi-era crimes and urged voters to support a nationalist party in the country’s general election.
As Mr. Musk has been intent on slashing the U.S. budget through an initiative he calls the Department of Government Efficiency, the electric vehicle company he runs has been steadily losing market share across Europe.
The automaker’s sales were down in the three largest European markets for electric cars in January.
In Germany, home to Tesla’s only factory in Europe, only 1,277 new Tesla vehicles were registered in the month, the German Federal Motor Transport Authority reported on Wednesday. German consumers turned instead to domestic and Chinese automakers for electric cars, which recorded a 54 percent increase in demand in January.
Tesla’s sales plummeted 63 percent in France in January from a year earlier, and 12 percent in Britain, where Mr. Musk riled British Prime Minister Keir Starmer through inflammatory social media posts.
Sweden, where a mechanics’ strike against Tesla is now in its second year, saw demand for its cars slide 44 percent last month, while sales in Norway dropped 38 percent.
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A Tesla taxi in 2004 in Oslo, Norway, where sales of Tesla vehicles also dropped in January.Credit...Jonathan Nackstrand/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
German buyers “may well be reacting to Musk’s comments” made at a convention of the right-wing Alternative for Germany party days before the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp, as well as a gesture he made after Mr. Trump’s inauguration, widely interpreted as a Nazi salute, Schmidt Automotive Research wrote in a report.
Other nonpolitical factors could be at play, including consumers’ waiting for the updated Model Y. It is expected to be released by the end of March.
The decline is also noticeable in the United States, although not as steep. In California, the largest U.S. market for electric cars, Tesla’s sales have been declining for months. Registration of new Tesla vehicles fell 11.6 percent there in 2024 even as overall sales of electric cars and trucks climbed 1.2 percent, according to the California New Car Dealers Association.
Vikas Bajaj contributed reporting.
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