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Sales of Tesla’s electric vehicles have fallen sharply across many of its key European markets amid a consumer backlash against Elon Musk’s interventions in the region’s politics.
The world’s largest EV maker in January registered only 1,277 new cars in Germany, according to the German Federal Motor Transport Authority, a drop of 59 per cent compared with the same month last year. The country hosts Tesla’s only manufacturing plant in Europe.
Sales of electric vehicles slowed sharply in Germany and France last year following a pullback in government subsidies, but demand has started to recover recently.
Tesla’s drop came as the German EV market in January grew more than 50 per cent year on year, pushing its market share down from 14 to 4 per cent.
In France, Tesla sales were down 63 per cent in January, while registrations of Tesla cars in Norway fell 38 per cent. In the UK, registrations declined 8 per cent from a year earlier.
Automotive analyst Matthias Schmidt said one factor behind Tesla’s sales decline in Germany could be that consumers were waiting for the upgraded Y model, scheduled for the first half of 2025. However, other experts have also blamed a backlash against Musk’s political involvement.
Musk has made an unprecedented intervention in German politics ahead of federal elections on February 23, becoming the richest and most powerful supporter of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD).
The party, seen as toxic by German business leaders as well as mainstream political parties, has been triumphant about the support from the owner of X and key aide to US President Donald Trump. Polls suggest it is on track to achieve a second-place finish in this month’s vote with a record high of more than 20 per cent of the vote.
Musk last month hosted Alice Weidel, a leader of the AfD, on his social media platform for a 75-minute discussion in which she falsely claimed that Adolf Hitler was a socialist.
While some party insiders questioned the wisdom of that line of discussion, they also expressed hope that Musk would boost their appeal among some segments of the electorate, particularly young men.
Musk has drawn sharp criticism from Chancellor Olaf Scholz and his main rival, Christian Democrat leader Friedrich Merz, for backing a party that has called for mass deportations of migrants, plays with Nazi-era slogans and is partly classified as rightwing extremist by Germany’s domestic intelligence agency.
An entrepreneur from the south-west state of Baden-Württemberg told German media that he had been “completely overrun” with orders for a sticker he produced for Tesla owners that read: “I bought this before Elon went crazy.” He said he had received as many as 2,000 orders in a single weekend.
Officials in Brussels have also stepped up their investigation into the role of X since Musk’s intervention, ordering the platform to hand over internal documents about its recommendation algorithm.