Tesla car sales down nearly 50% in Europe…

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close-up photography of red car
Photo by Vlad Tchompalov on Unsplash

About six months ago I was at a business event. Tesla had a stall there, and being a geek, I wandered over to look at the cars. The salesguy glided over to me and asked if I was interested in buying one. I explained that I already had an electric car ( a VW ID3) and more importantly I would never buy one because I thought that Elon Musk is a dick. Yeah, we get that a lot, he replied.

Six months later, Elon Musk’s erratic ‘presidency’ made Tesla even harder to sell. In Germany, where Musk backed the right-wing parties in the election, sales are down nearly 60%.

Teslas are now being branded ‘Swasticar’

With owners taking to putting stickers on their cars:

Tesla resale values are also taking a hit, which may be good news if you are in the market for one.

Tesla’s stock price has dropped 30% in the past month. It is now worth less than 1 trillion dollars, but even that figure is insanely overvalued. The Tesla price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio is up at over 100 when other car companies like Toyota trade at a P/E of around 8 to 10. If you were to value Tesla the same way as Toyota then its value would drop to $50 billion.

Tesla claims to be a tech company first, but as the new Chinese rivals like BYD have shown, there is nothing particularly unique about Tesla. And in my own case I am very happy with my VW ID3.

Former Tesla director Peter Bardenfleth-Hansen told the BBC that “he may be getting a bigger fanbase within a specific type of clientele, but they’re not the ones that are buying the Teslas.”.

As a 20% owner of Tesla, Musk has lost more than $100B since December. The amounts are staggering, but I don’t think he will be signing on anytime soon.

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