Germany has apparently seen the writing on the wall for what Tesla and its CEO, Elon Musk, represent, and in turn, sales plummeted 59 percent in January. It comes as Musk further inserts himself into both the U.S. government and Germany’s politics.
The Austin, Texas-based automaker registered just 1,277 new cars in Germany last month. That works out to be its lowest monthly total since July of 2021, and that was when there was a pandemic happening. The drop also means Tesla has lost a big chunk of ground in Germany’s EV market – a market that was actually up 54 percent for the month, according to Bloomberg. It could lead you to believe that Musk’s extremely vocal support of Germany’s far-right “Alternative for Germany” party is hurting demand.
Things were not much better for Tesla in the United Kingdom, France or the rest of Europe in January, either, as Ars Technica explains:
Tesla sales dropped around 13 percent across Europe in 2024, but so far this year, the scale of the problem is far greater. In France, sales of new Teslas fell by 63 percent, while total car sales in the country fell by just 6 percent, with EV sales dropping just half a percent.
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Across the Channel, the British auto industry just released its sales data for January. Here, Tesla sales fell less precipitously—just 12 percent. However, battery EV sales were 35 percent higher in the UK in January 2025 than in January 2024. The cake is growing, but Tesla is getting to eat less and less of it.
Large declines have also been recorded in Sweden (44 percent), Norway (38 percent), and the Netherlands (42 percent).
Earlier this year, Musk hosted a live discussion with AfD leader Alice Weidel on his social media site X ahead of Germany’s federal election that is slated for February 23. During the chat, he made some, uh, questionable comments about Nazis. From Bloomberg:
[T]he Tesla CEO urged Germans to be proud of their culture and, in an apparent reference to wartime atrocities under the Nazis, discouraged “too much focus on past guilt.”
Yikes, dude. In fact, it’s double yikes when you consider the fact Musk made these comments just before the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. Folks in Germany did not take too kindly to Musk’s words.