Six tough weeks began for Tesla in China in mid-April.
Shortly beforehand, CEO Elon Musk had stated that by far the largest market for electric cars in the world could also become the most important sales market for the American manufacturer.
But no sooner had the company's founder made his forecast than one Tesla after another began to spread fear and anger on the Chinese Internet.
Hendrik Ankenbrand
Business correspondent for China based in Shanghai.
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In the late evening of April 17, the passenger died in a Tesla in the Zengcheng district of the southern metropolis of Guangzhou. A video circulating on social media showed a Tesla out of control, which first crashed into the concrete guardrail and then after a few turns into the back of a car in the next lane. Then the Tesla caught fire.
On the morning of April 27, a Tesla smashed into a breakfast bar in Suzhou, near Shanghai. An elderly customer and the shopkeeper had to go to the hospital. On May 1, a Tesla 3 slammed into the pillar of a parking garage in Guangzhou. The driver's family later claimed that the driver hit the brakes but accelerated the vehicle. In addition, the airbag did not open. Six days later, a retired police officer died at the wheel of his Tesla after crashing into a truck driving in front of him in the southern city of Shaoguan at an allegedly 150 kilometers per hour.
On the evening of May 13th, a woman named Luo slammed into the concrete wall of her underground car park in the Binjiang District of the east coast city of Hangzhou. The driver reported that the brakes had failed. On May 17, a black Tesla knocked over two traffic police in Taizhou City, Zhejiang Province, and one died. A day later, in Chongqing, the jaw of a boy of elementary school age broke after the mother had an accident with her Tesla in the underground car park. The vehicle accelerated independently and did not react when the brakes were applied, which a red brake light appeared to confirm in the surveillance video.
The driver of the Tesla, who drove into four other cars at an intersection in Nanjing on May 28, also said that the car had accelerated itself, as if driven by evil forces.
The penultimate day of the month had another terrible news ready: Tesla owner Wen from Shenzhen complained of almost suffocating in his car.
After the car could not be charged, the owner returned to the driver's seat - but suddenly all the systems switched off.
After ten minutes a taxi driver came by and noticed Mr. Wen pounding on the pane of glass.
Together with other helpers, he broke a window.
When Tesla employees examined the car after two hours, they said the cause could have been with the battery.
Elon Musk is considered a hero
It is not as if only Teslas crashed in China, a billionaire nation. In 2019, the year for which the National Bureau of Statistics presented the latest official data, the country had an average of 679 accidents per day, resulting in 674 injuries and 172 deaths. But most of the Chinese do not hear about them. The videos of the Teslas gone wild, on the other hand, spread across the country like wildfire. Only the image of the traffic surveillance camera of the Tesla crashing into the guardrail in Guangzhou, released by the police, was viewed by over six million people on the Weibo short message service and was sent from there to numerous other channels.