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Tesla production in Grünheide
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Patrick Pleul/dpa
It was a disastrous week for Tesla: The world's most valuable car manufacturer shocked its investors when it published sales figures for the first three months of 2024 on Tuesday. At almost 423,000 cars, they were not only well below observers' expectations, but also fell compared to the quarter a year earlier.
Tesla's growth story, which has driven the company's value to the top of the world, is in acute danger - and with it the wealth of its boss Elon Musk, whose status as the third richest person in the world currently depends heavily on the share price of his electric car company.
Tesla's problems have been apparent in Germany for longer than on the global market. This is shown by sales figures from the auto industry portal Marklines, which are available to SPIEGEL. Accordingly, the group led by multi-billionaire Elon Musk sold fewer cars in 2023 than in the previous year - bucking the trend of other large e-car markets in Europe.
While Tesla delivered 69,900 cars in Germany in 2022, it was only 63,600 in 2023. In the Netherlands, on the other hand, Tesla quadrupled its sales in 2023 to 19,600 cars. With 63,100 models sold (2022: 29,400), France almost overtook Germany as the largest Tesla sales market in Europe. The car manufacturer increased its sales worldwide by a third in 2023, but they only collapsed in the first quarter of 2024.
The extent of the weakness in this country is surprising, especially since the overall German market for purely battery-electric cars was still growing last year. Germany's market leader, the VW Group, increased its sales from 120,200 to 146,800 electric cars with subsidiaries such as Audi, Škoda and Seat.
In 2024, Tesla sales slipped further: In January and February, the electric car manufacturer, which operates its only European factory in Grünheide near Berlin, only sold 9,200 vehicles. In the same period last year there were 11,900. The period was before the arson attack on the power supply of the Tesla factory in Brandenburg, which resulted in production outages lasting several days. However, the factory had to take a long two-week break in production in January because important parts were missing following attacks by Houthi militias on ships in the Red Sea.
The federal government's decision to completely cancel the purchase bonus for electric vehicles in mid-December cannot alone explain Tesla's decline in sales at the beginning of the year. At the same time, other manufacturers increased their electric car sales in Germany: Mercedes moved closer to Tesla with 6,900 electric vehicles sold in the first two months, and BMW (5,200 vehicles) and Hyundai with its main brand and its subsidiary Kia (3,900) also caught up.
In addition to the generally weak economy for electric cars, Tesla is faced with several problems that the company and its boss have themselves to blame: an aging product portfolio, for example, which has remained largely unchanged since the introduction of the Model Y in 2020. Or Tesla's erratic price-cutting policy, which failed in its goal of increasing sales but caused the residual value of used vehicles to plummet.
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That didn't help sales in this country. Marklines has not yet published any sales figures for March. However, the Federal Motor Transport Authority (KBA) reports another significant slump: Compared to March 2023, Tesla's new registrations fell by more than half to 3,878 cars - this is an even greater slump than electric cars are currently generally experiencing. Industry-wide registrations for electric vehicles fell by 28.9 percent last month.