The US electric car manufacturer Tesla lowers the prices of its bestsellers in Germany and the USA. The group announced this late Thursday. Depending on the configuration, customers in Germany will then have to pay between one and 17 percent less for the Model 3 sedan and the worldwide Tesla bestseller Model Y. According to the Teslamag blog, the company is now offering the Model 3 from 43,990 euros. That’s 6,000 euros less than before.
In the US, prices will fall by 6 to 20 percent, according to Reuters calculations. For a US customer who now pays the lower price for a Model Y and then takes advantage of the subsidies that came into force in the US this month, the discount adds up to 31 percent.
For the past week and October, Tesla has already had prices in China, South Korea, Japan, Singapore and Australia lowered. As a result, hundreds of Tesla owners gathered in front of Tesla showrooms and delivery centers in China to protest the US company’s pricing policy to protest. They felt deceived by the electric car pioneer’s sudden significant price cuts.
But Tesla is under pressure, after all, sales plummeted in December. For the fourth quarter as a whole, the company missed analysts’ expectations for the number of vehicles delivered.
competition forms
Experts see the e-car pioneer confronted with several problems. This includes the weakness of the world’s largest car market in China, Competition from traditional corporations like ford and General Motors as well as from start-ups such as Rivian Automotive and the Lucid Group.
That’s why the stock has been under pressure for months. In the past year, the paper has lost around 65 percent in value, the biggest loss since the IPO in 2010. Significant losses were again apparent on Friday, the papers were last listed around 4 percent below their Nasdaq closing price of $ 123.56.
Investors are concerned not only about weaker growth and weakening demand. Also the double role of Elon Musk (51) as head of Tesla and of Twitter met with criticism: Instead of concentrating on the growth of the Tesla cash machine, Musk spent a large part of his time on the Twitter restructuring case, criticized, for example Tesla investor Leo Koguan. In order to finance the Twitter takeover, Musk had also sold Tesla shares several times – this also accelerated the slide in prices.
For Musk personally, that meant an unprecedented loss of wealth. Lay his estimated fortune aloud “Bloomberg”
in November 2021 it was still around 340 billion US dollars, but it has now melted down to around 132 billion US dollars.