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Posted by moosedman 11/5/2025

Tesla's German car sales more than halve in October as wider EV sales jump(www.reuters.com)
73 points | 135 comments
breve 11/5/2025|
Swasticars don't sell well.

The main problem with Musk's proposed pay deal is that he still gets paid billions even if he continues to fail:

https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/musks-record-tes...

Tesla's sales target is now to have sold 20 million cars in total by 2035. That's fewer cars in total in what will then be the 32 year history of the company than Toyota sold in the last two years:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/05/business/elon-musk-tesla-...

Tesla's target used to be 20 million per year:

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-...

But Tesla's board doesn't care. They got theirs:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/13/business/tesla-stock-sale...

https://www.afr.com/technology/life-changing-wealth-stopped-...

KaiserPro 11/5/2025||
Part of this is down to musk being an obnoxious prick, but a larger part is down to teslas not actually being innovative, cheap or high quality enough any more.

They look dated, or weird, have patchy customer service, and are not even that long range anymore.

m463 11/5/2025||
I think the model s, model 3 or the previous model y look great.

The recent model y looks terrible, like a duck.

And the ergonomics are cheap and dangerous.

Removing turn signal stalks, drive select stalks is dangerous. I like the idea of buttons, but turn signal buttons? buttons on a moving steering wheel? and the rest of the critical controls buried on a touchscreen? inside door handles? ugh.

mvdtnz 11/6/2025||
> I think the model s, model 3 or the previous model y look great.

They look terrible. They looked terrible when they came out 13, 8 and 5 years ago and they have aged very poorly.

cosmicgadget 11/6/2025||
I think we will solve this aesthetics dispute with additional, more emphatic, back and forth.
m463 11/7/2025||
well, sales say apparently not so much forth as the cybertruck.
pimeys 11/5/2025|||
They are all over Berlin as rentals, which you can rent from your phone, and pay per kilometer. People can test drive them easily, and they are not super nice cars. We much prefer the Audis, Toyotas, and Volkswagens that are also in the pool.
rstupek 11/5/2025||
From US sales, Audi can't give away their electric cars. Is it any different in Berlin or are you referring to gas/diesel Audis?
bryanlarsen 11/5/2025|||
The VW group sells 13 different vehicles built on the MEB platform. The id.4 alone sells comparably to the Tesla Y, but if you consider all 13 the same car they are far and away the best selling car in Europe.

Considering all 13 the same might be a stretch, but if you just take the 6 that are the same size as the id.4 you still end up with the same result.

dzhiurgis 11/5/2025||
In 10-20-30 years, which one do you think you'll be able to maintain - obscure VW ID.4.324.7-cz or Tesla Model Y?
bryanlarsen 11/5/2025|||
The VW, obviously. With most parts shared across 13 models and all models static for at least a year and usually longer. Plus VW has a good history of parts availability.

Tesla on the other hand is famous for both making minor changes to their vehicles pretty much continuously and a bad history of parts availability.

dzhiurgis 11/6/2025||
1M cars over 13 models mean you’ll have no parts at all. 10M identical cars means there’s massive third party supply. Parts are already cheaper than Toyota’s.
rsynnott 11/6/2025|||
Teslas very much aren't identical over models. Remember this? https://www.extremetech.com/cars/314871-tesla-model-y-owners...
dzhiurgis 11/6/2025||
Moot point over a bracket when car has over 30k total parts.
bryanlarsen 11/6/2025|||
A typical car sells tens of thousands per year and has no problem with parts availability. 1M cars is even easier.
dzhiurgis 11/7/2025||
Rivian and Lucid sells like 15k per quarter and is on verge of bankruptcy.
orwin 11/6/2025||||
I have hosted the models (mostly regression and random forest) WV use to predict missing part availability at their dealership in 2018-2020 (considering sales in the area, average fabrication/delivery time, likeliness of the part having to be replaced, probably others).

I guarantee you that even if I don't like their car, their dealership will very likely have the part you need around the time you need it. It's not the only car-adjacent company that does something like this (Valeo for sure does it too, i worked with them also), but I'm pretty sure it's the only one who has an internal data scientist team working on it.

dzhiurgis 11/6/2025||
[flagged]
_aavaa_ 11/5/2025||||
Is this a trick question? I know the Tesla software locks as much as possible to prevent third party repairs.
dzhiurgis 11/6/2025||
Huh? All cars are software locked.

With Tesla at least you can pay $5 per day to use their tools (and you NEED their tools because they are up to date with cars firmware).

I'm sure once cars are EOL'd Tesla will release final version of diagnostics, like they did with Roadster - https://github.com/teslamotors/roadster

gnabgib 11/7/2025||
All? My 1927 Ford doesn't seem to understand bluetooth
rsynnott 11/6/2025|||
... What makes you think a VW ID.4 is obscure? I think it's usually the best-selling electric car in Europe. You see way more of those with recent (last few years) registrations in Dublin than Teslas.
dzhiurgis 11/6/2025||
Less than 1M units total sold worldwide or about 10x less.
pimeys 11/5/2025|||
Gas/diesel mostly.
dzhiurgis 11/5/2025||
They are still insanely good value for money. Buying car for its looks is not smart.

Yet (salute + support for ADF party) * touchy german history = auto non-grata.

mk89 11/5/2025||
This is not just German related, apparently. It seems Tesla sales in EU are falling since 2023 [0].

And it seems that until now, Tesla sales in Eu are 30% less than last year [1]

There is more competition, finally.

[0]: https://www.benzinga.com/tech/25/01/43092840/tesla-struggles...

[1]: https://electrek.co/2025/11/03/tesla-tsla-keeps-getting-batt...

afavour 11/5/2025||
It'll be interesting to see how this plays out. Tesla has been way, way overvalued for a very long time. If that starts to change I suspect it'll change very quickly and Musk's status might see a dramatic change.
Iulioh 11/5/2025|
If Tesla's valuation had to follow earnings it would not even be in the SNP500
Forgeties79 11/5/2025||
You could say that about a lot of companies right now to be honest. It’s kind of wild how detached from reality some stocks are. But there’s no denying that Tesla is one of the most egregious examples.
fundatus 11/5/2025||
Interesting, not only is Tesla 50% down YTD, but it seems like BYD almost caught up with them:

15,595 (Tesla) vs. 15,171 (BYD)

chollida1 11/5/2025|
> Interesting, not only is Tesla 50% down YTD,

TSLA is not down 50% YTD. Its up this year so far.

Can you show the math that shows it down 50% YTD?

fundatus 11/5/2025|||
I am talking about the numbers in the article (Tesla sales in Germany), not the stock:

> The number of Teslas sold in the January-October period dropped 50.4% to 15,595 units, compared with the same period last year.

senordevnyc 11/6/2025|||
TSLA believers have long since forgotten that these four characters are connected to a company that is ostensibly supposed to be selling cars. It might as well be an NFT to them.
chollida1 11/6/2025|||
OH, ok, glad I asked then:)

Appreciate the explanation.

mk89 11/5/2025||||
It's literally written in the article:

> The number of Teslas sold in the January-October period dropped 50.4% to 15,595 units, compared with the same period last year.

YoY is -50%.

submeta 11/5/2025||
Elon promised too much (self driving cars coming next month, this time for real), and the market has realized that after the 25th promise, he‘s not going to deliver.

Also, Elon should have stick to cars and rockets. His venturing into politics, and into media (with buying X) didn’t help him either. He got demystified, and demolished his image of a super focused half-einstein, half-edison. Now more of an half-Trump. And that didn’t help his car sales either.

hiddencost 11/5/2025|
It wasn't a promise, it was a lie.
dzhiurgis 11/5/2025||
It self drives in like 6 or 7 countries now.
ceejayoz 11/6/2025||
Unsupervised?
yalogin 11/5/2025||
We know why the decline is happening. However, I am more curious to see how long people's memory will last. Also a little surprised that there isn't a whole lot of decline in the US.
ChrisArchitect 11/5/2025||
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45826384
LightBug1 11/5/2025||
Excellent news. Thanks.
LightBug1 11/5/2025|
When I think of Tesla, I think Elon Musk sweeping up some garbage on the street while simultaneously taking a dump on it ...

I'll never buy a Tesla. Personally, Musk has delivered generational toxicity to their brand. And he now seeks to be rewarded for that.

The Board is dysfunctional.