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.

  • Underwire@lemmy.world
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    42 minutes ago

    It is already dumb for a German to buy an American car. It is like a French buying an American wine.

    • doeknius_gloek@discuss.tchncs.de
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      21 minutes ago

      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.

  • SilentStorms@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    19 minutes ago

    That’s pretty wild considering the rise of AfD support there.

    I wonder if Elon’s endorsement was a detriment to their election campaign.

    • fluffy@feddit.org
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      8 minutes ago

      Well, they are afraid of electric vehicles, they want the good old polluting combustion engine.

  • Denixen@feddit.nu
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    1 hour ago

    Neintyfour percent say no. Doesn’t this mean like most of AfD voters also say nein?

    • joostjakob@lemmy.world
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      1 hour ago

      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.

    • A_norny_mousse@feddit.org
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      17 minutes ago

      Vierundneunzig, bitte.

      Since they got much more than 6% during the last election, and 82% of all people voted, yes.

    • silver13@lemmy.world
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      1 hour ago

      Because they have been fed massive propaganda against EVs for years, they would never buy one anyway.