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After writing about Tesla’s 10% drop in sales in the UK despite the UK EV market rising 24%, and BYD passing up Tesla in the UK in annual sales last year, a reader pointed out some extra jaw-dropping stats. The reader, “manes,” posted the numbers for Tesla in Germany in the past 5 years.
If you get nauseous looking at gory scenes, turn away now. Here’s what “manes” shared:
“Numbers from Germany:* 2025: 19,390* 2024: 37,574* 2023: 63,685* 2022: 69,965* 2021: 39,714
So Tesla fell to 28% of its peak in ’22.”
Wowza! Tesla sales in Germany, the largest auto market in Europe, dropped 72% in 2025 compared to Tesla’s best year in that country, way back in 2022.
Edit/update: Also note that the BEV market grew by 43% in 2025!
After 2022, Tesla had a modest but clear drop in sales in 2023, and then they had a huge collapse in sales in 2024 — which Tesla was supposed to bounce back from last year thanks to the refreshed Model Y coming to town — but that wasn’t the end! Sales dropped even significantly further in 2025, dropping almost 50%!
Going from 69,965 sales in the company’s peak year to 63,685 sales the following year, then a shocking 37,75 sales, and then to 19,390?! The year Tesla opened Giga Berlin, it looked like it was only upward for Tesla in Europe. And then it crashed hard, year after year after year.
Of course, a big factor for Tesla’s sales drop in Germany was Elon Musk getting involved in hardcore right-wing politics. Musk strongly endorsed the AfD (Alternative for Germany) political party in recent years, a political party identified as an extremist, far-right party. “In the 2024 Thuringian state election, the AfD became the first far-right party in Germany since the Nazi Party to win a plurality of seats in a state election. The AfD also performed strongly in Brandenburg and Saxony,” Wikipedia writes. “On 23 February 2025 AfD won 20.8% of the vote in the German federal election, second to the CDU/CSU. It gained 10.4 percentage points over the 2021 election result.” So, yes, the party got more popular in the past couple of years, but that doesn’t mean it is popular. The large majority of Germans do not support it, and many are shocked and disgusted by its political stances. Throwing his support behind AfD, Musk stimulated huge anti-Tesla sentiment in the country.
Musk also made some abhorrent comments regarding Nazis and Hitler that went even a step further. We have a German on our leadership team who has been saying for a while that the Tesla brand is completely in the ditch, hated, and hopeless in Germany now. Despite having a factory there and the brand being very popular a few years ago, his take is that no one wants a Tesla any more, and that the cars aren’t even the best in tech any more. I wasn’t sure how much his comments reflected the whole market, but dropping from 69,965 annual sales to 19,390 annual sales in three years is a dramatic drop that is almost unheard of in the auto industry. It takes a lot of work to drop that far that fast. Also, beyond the brand hit from Elon Musk’s activities, it is true that German automakers BMW, Mercedes, and Volkswagen, among others, have been rolling out new EV after new EV, and Tesla has lost its competitive edge in the country.
The big question is: what will Tesla’s numbers be in Germany, and in Europe more broadly, in 2026 and beyond? What is in store now for the company that once dominated the EV market?
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