Tesla sales crash continues in Europe, with Germany down 70% | Hacker News Reader

Tesla sales crash continues in Europe, with Germany down 70%

electrek.co

85 pointszfg62 comments

One important facet that our American chums might not know, is that many people in Europe already felt that Teslas were ugly, hateful cars. They were the ultimate gadget for people on a company car scheme (big tax advantages used to exist for EVs).

I think there a lot of people who would tolerate being treated as a pompous arse because of their car, but wouldn't tolerate being made fun of. In the UK being a source of ridicule to your peers is the worst insult. Musk, and by extension his cars, are a laughing stock.

> One important facet that our American chums might not know, is that many people in Europe already felt that Teslas were ugly, hateful cars

That's correct. And that was true even before Elon became a more politically controversial figure.

Not sure why people would think Teslas (excluding Cyber Truck) are ugly or pompous

For a long time Tesla had barely any presence in Europe, and Model S and X were expensive rare cars, from a weird foreign brand. Driving that was a delicate balance between coolness and showing off, and then Musk changed the image from cool to extremely divorced midlife crisis.

Now that EVs are more mainstream, there is already competition from new VW, Kia, Hyundai, Renault, Volvo, BMW, which makes Model 3 kinda bland, and the more popular Model Y looks like Model 3's CAD design stretched vertically by 20%.

Supercharger network doesn't have a significant advantage in Europe, all new cars use the same connector already, so buying a Tesla is a choice. People question why do you buy a car that isn't pretty, isn't cheap, isn't from a "real" car brand, and is associated with Musk's antics.

Did you know that car companies often have different models for the US and Europe? Some of it is the practicality of our smaller roads. Much of it is taste.

The S is a beautiful car. The rest are awkward looking, the 3 and Y because of their stunted anterior.

The UK is the one place where sales rose.

This is an oddly aggressive claim for a pretty generic looking car and doesn’t seem to align with reality

Markets still seem to be pricing Tesla as a company that has large growth potential. Anyone have a reasonable case to make here for this being true?

Humanoid robots and self driving car deals. At least that’s why people are thinking

Lot of stocks are not profit based at this point.

CEO controls the US government (corruption)

For retail players its sunk cost fallacy. For everyone else they are trying to manage their exit.

Anyone who has tried taking a short position on Tesla in the past got squeezed terribly. So the number of short positions on the stock is inordinately small.

No, and it is one of a number of high profile companies that could never sustain their growth.

I think there are at least two reasons for the absurd valuation.

1) The growth in Western inequality has pushed more money into fewer hands. They are desperately short of assets to buy, so they crowd into certain assets, pushing the prices too high.

2) The Emperors new clothes effect. Nobody who has invested wants to pull out first

It’s partially a meme stock propped up by true believers. Well true believers who have never had to be truly tested. The next 6 months of Tesla stock pricing will test their grit. Their stock rise hasn’t been tied to financial reality for a moment. Tbh though it has historically worked out for them but I don’t see the argument for continued investment today.

Tesla can be seen as becoming the Saudi Aramco of the U.S. , an hybrid private-public company propped up by the largest military and economy in the world.

Basically the argument for investing in ExxonMobil 1985-2015 but on steroids because of the access that the CEO has and the social media narrative building that wasn't there for Exxon to capitalize on back then

the problem for Tesla is that if this is what they are they are not getting 30 years, 2026 is as far as that goes :)

Lets hope you wont be surprised. Everybody thought that about Putin in begining too.

Still don't explain the price. Aramco seems to have 10-20 P/E ratio (excluding 2020 demand drop in oil). Where as Tesla is at 80 now... I just don't think enough money can be pumped in Tesla to make current valuation sane. Without outright paying for those earnings by in essence gifting money.

They still make good cars and the AI seems quite close to working. The model Y is still the worlds best selling vehicle. They'd probably be doing well if their ceo hadn't gone off the rails a bit.

Model Y was best selling electric vehicle.

Anyway Musk isnt interested in personal vehicle sales because that could never live up to the insane evaulation. He will have to push for some moonshot project that investors might believe could work. Its the robo taxis and likely government contracts for public transport, police and army.

As a potential investor I always saw the main value proposition as Tesla are the best at making modern cars so will take like 35% of the global market and be worth a lot. That's looking less plausible as Elon has moved to other things and BYD et al have stayed focused and are eating their lunch.

The market is currently valuing the stock based primarily on their robotaxi initiative and humanoid robots.

The market is currently valuing it on what it thinks other investors in the market will value it at.

It's a class in the Greater Fool Theory of investing, writ large.

What do you think it would take to create a cascading loss of confidence in the security?

Time

Time and bad results. That said the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.

I think you are right. A minor shock in share price from a bad profit announcement will cause certain traders to have to sell to stop the loss getting worse, probably by an automated stop-loss order. This will start a chain reaction.

Those are two startups attached to a destroyed brand and an auto company. Idk why anyone would invest.

How is there not a massive shareholder lawsuit against Elon Musk right now. Clearly he and his fiduciary duty could not be more separate.

first, folks need to exit/reduce their positions stealthily without disrupting the market. this takes time; for big positions it is not unusual to be exiting it for more than 6 months

The fun part will be if everyone is trying to do it at the same time, as they probably are. They will be trapped and have nothing left to do but sue

This is true, Tesla as a car company would have been much better if Musk quit it at least 2 years ago.

Tesla as a stock, which is the primary product of the company, would crater immediately, by something like 90%. All of it's "future value" is derived from fantasies closely tied to Elon Musk "genius". If one value Tesla as a car company, it's worth something like 10$/share.

PS. Tesla head of board of directors, Robyn Denholm, sold almost 120M$ worth of shares in the last 3 months, something like >60% of her holdings.

I'm not sure suing ceos for bad choices is a thing. Has it ever been done successfully?

Why in the world did this get flagged? Seems incredible relevant to the HN crowd.

Because there is a large pro-Musk crowd on HN that will flag anything that portrays him in a way they feel is negative.

It'd be cool if we could tag dang somehow and show that this is unfairly flagged. People who flag plain, factual, content like this should have their flagging ability demoted.

There have been a lot of Tesla sales crash stories.

And by a lot - around 18 stories about Tesla sales plunging for the last 30 days with the articles looking mostly the same without any new information. That's a bit too much.

Tesla posts delivery numbers the day after quarter end and several weeks before earnings, so that's the one to really watch out for. If they don't post anything on April 1 or 2, you know something real is up.

In general, I think Musk really failed the marshmallow test - keeping on the sidelines and working through the existing system (for autonomy, spaceflight, etc) would have been more painful, but would have delivered greater returns long-term. Instead he decided to take a shortcut by buying a president and torching the regulatory system, and he'll succeed, but will that actually pay off? Self-driving Teslas will be allowed without any questions nation-wide, but will people get into them after what he's done? Will people let Teslabots into their house? I don't think the destroyed trust will make up for the lack of regulations.

Even finances aside, being the #1 oligarch doesn't always end well - just ask Jack Ma or Mikhail Khodorkovsky. He would have been safer under the old rule-of-law American system.

> Instead he decided to take a shortcut by buying a president and torching the regulatory system, and he'll succeed, but will that actually pay off? Self-driving Teslas will be allowed without any questions nation-wide, but will people get into them after what he's done?

I don't think he cares too much about self driving regulation compared to other factors. Trump's tariff's against Mexico greatly benefit Tesla by making the supply chains used by other American carmakers more costly. He can easily push for SpaceX contracts from the top down. And he can advocate for favorable policy towards X.ai, Twitter, etc.

With regards to self driving, Tesla has always been in the grey area where their marketing clashes with their legal stance (i.e. that the human must remain in control at all times and therefore must keep liability). They've haven't bothered so far with the legal legwork to do real autonomous driving the way that competitors like Waymo did. And it will be make years before they need to do that, since their current tech is far from real autonomous driving.

It feels to me that it can’t be lost on anyone or a coincidence that given Musk’s tangential (official) relationship to the government, he’s a really good scapegoat if something goes south with Doge.

No one wants to the the richest man on China. Chinese billionaires kept sinking their valuations to try to keep out of the spotlight.

> Even finances aside, being the #1 oligarch doesn't always end well - just ask Jack Ma or Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

Pretty much _never_ ends well, I would think; note just how careless Russia’s top oligarchs have historically been around windows, balconies, stairs etc.

Maybe he'll speedrun getting from US gov the trillions need for his Mars grand vision and forget Tesla + other projects as trickle financing engine. 100s of billions isn't going to cut it. I mean he's not young, maybe like hailmary gamble to accelerate Mars, then he'll be in the history books and sandbagging US is merely going to be footnote. Either way he'll die with more money than he knows what to do with.

It's all a bit reminiscent of Ratner's. For those who don't know Ratner's was the UK's biggest jewelry chain and did very well until their boss joked about their cheaper products being total crap, which was then picked up by the press which caused people to stop buying there which caused the chain to go bust.

Likewise here. Musk (maybe jokingly?) does a nazi salute, sales fall 50%, we will see how it goes.

Ratner is still around and launched a new jewlery brand which is doing ok.

Wait for the tariffs to kick in a month.

What effect do you think that will have on European sales?

Lots of the Tesla suppliers are in the US. So even if we assume that the EU will keep supporting Tesla manufacturing in Europe (not clear at this point at all), their production costs and hence eu prices will go up.

Also with the tariffs the anti-Americanism front will only grow stronger, essentially boycotting anything made in USA.

Most likely tesla has a target on its back, and will be the first American company to die as a result of the trade war.

> essentially boycotting anything made in USA.

I wish this would extend to social media and tech as a whole. Maybe in due time.

If I had to guess, the days of X in Europe are limited

X has always been pretty small social media network in EU. Its mostly used by govs and journalists for announcements. Then maybe by hard right elon fans.

What about Meta? That is the real deal.

Are you anticipating that the EU is going to put tarrifs on US goods?

… I mean, yeah, if the US increases tariffs on the EU, the EU will increase tariffs on the US. That is how trade wars _work_.

Since the US president already spelled out that he will tariff EU, it's only logical that the EU will retaliate. They would be very retarded to not do so.

The interesting part is that since the US is being hostile to many countries at once, it is logical that those countries will start to trade more among themselves. In a sense it is like the US is sanctioning itself. Not something I ever really expected. Interesting times ahead.

Pretty obvious outcome given the PR nightmare

To all of the people who were claiming that the US can do whatever it wants...

...I wonder if Musk and his shareholders don't care about money from us liberal, woke, left wing Europeans? I suppose that is noble, being willing to destroy your brand for your ideals, no matter how half-baked. For someone like Musk, who mostly acts like money is the one true god, this is a bit of a mixed up philosophy. Perhaps he is not quite as smart as he thinks he is.

I wonder how long before Trump throws him under a bus.

Replying to myself. I see two scenarios.

1) When Trump needs a fall guy for skyrocketing inflation, or widespread protests about failing public services

2) There might be some Republican lawmakers who feel that they will need a career post Trump and will pick a time to demand Musk goes

3) Party funders will get sick of losing so much money in the turmoil and will demand a scapegoat

In the end, does it matter what happens to Musk? He's just a general doing cavalry charges. The money strings behind all of this go way deeper, and Vance is firmly tied to them via Thiel and friends.

It very likely goverment itself will prop up tesla with contracts directly. Same with Palantir and Anduril replacing the old guard Boeing and Lockhead.

I mean, even that only lasts for, at most, four years (assuming that Musk stays in minihands’ favour for the whole term, which is rather doubtful).

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