Tesla Sales Fall Off a Cliff Globally, Including Germany, Australia, and China
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A large portion of Tesla’s sales were driven by a lack of decent alternatives if you wanted a BEV. Today that’s no longer the case, especially in Europe and China.
And instead of pushing for a new small Model 2 with global appeal, they launched Cybertruck and Cybercab. Meanwhile Model S and X are just plain old. This is becoming a case study in 1) squandering a market lead, and 2) the danger of making devil’s bargains with China.
It really is a combination of better and cheaper Chinese EVs, Trump negatively impacting Australia e.g. tariffs, undermining security and Musk's antics e.g. Nazi salute etc.
New model y releasing in May.
This may not explain all of the drop off, but I’m certain this refreshed model explains some of it.
Tesla has had the slowest and most minor refresh cycles of any car marker in my lifetime and it has had a minimal impact on sales. Not sure why a refreshed Y is suddenly going to result in a 70% increase in sales.
Especially when in the next few weeks Trump/Musk are expected to start a trade war with Australia.
The thing is Tesla operates on a "continuous refresh" model, they constantly iterate on all aspects of their design.
The downside of this is it makes supply chains for spare parts an utter damn nightmare, which is why spare parts are so hard to come by.
Edit: mostly speaking about Model Y, as Model 3 had actual refresh recently.
Electric cars are getting simpler. Lithium-iron-phosphate batteries are safer. BYD has an "E-axle" kit, where motor, axle, and differential are a single unit. That goes with a power electronics box and battery.[1] Talks CANbus to the controls. Plug everything together and put a body on top, and you have a car. Or a truck.
EVs from all manufacturers are getting much cheaper. Margins are decreasing. This is a big problem for Tesla, with their grossly inflated stock price. Musk liked to say that Tesla investors are not investing in a car company, they are betting on Tesla's technology. What technology? Tesla is way behind Waymo in self-driving. There are at least four other humanoid robots as good as Tesla's, none profitable. Tesla is nowhere in solid-state batteries.
Rivian is outselling all other US makers in electric pickup trucks. Rivian's truck is not weird, like the Cybertruck, and it seems to be a decent pickup truck, although overpriced. I see them being driven around, often being used to do truck things, not just car things.
Even in the US, with protectionism keeping BYD out, Tesla isn't doing that well any more.
[1] https://insideevs.com/news/738606/byd-ev-teardown-impresses-...
https://ir.tesla.com/press-release/tesla-fourth-quarter-2024...
Cybercab is doubling down on the speculative fiction future that fuels stock valuations that are out of line with the rest of the industry.
It's so incredibly inefficient to have individually owned cars just rotting away on the side of the road and in car parks waiting for their owner.
It would be so much better for everyone if no one, except enthusiasts, would own a car. And you could just grab an "auto taxi" wherever you are within a few minutes instead. Perhaps someday...
Buses are already cheap and removing the cost of the driver would offer only a marginal reduction in cost.
I'm not seeing a ton of inefficiency in me buying a bottom-of-the-line car and driving it until it's no longer driveable?
there's a good option for car sharing in vienna (car2go), but that's mostly inner-city iirc, so not my use case.
i guess, car sharing wouldn't reduce grid lock but ride sharing would. i suspect, ride sharing would be more acceptable if it wasn't your own car.
I also have an "Occupy Mars" shirt. It was one thing to bandwagon onto some topical events by a CEO who was touting Tesla's 100/100 lgbt friendliness rating and progressing toward human exploration, then one seig heiling and throwing the whole government into disarray and betraying our allies.
I hope we can now all see that
1) it won't get us to mars but
2) it will bring us a total-recall like dystopia.
The combination however has been highly toxic for Tesla, like Apple it had an initial lead and a high trust factor due to size, experience and perceived tech lead. This also allowed them to charge a premium compared to the other makers.
Elon single-handedly eroded most of the trust factor and now that people are looking at alternatives (and being happy), they'll notice that there isn't much of a reason to be paying the premium in 2025 (not like 5-10 years ago).
The biggest question now is if they can ever recapture the position they held even with Elon gone or if they're yet another BEV automaker, trust as the saying goes is hard to gain and easy to squander (And even if Elon is gone, some of the previous halo goes with him but the antipathy cannot be gotten over with him in the reins, catch-22).
And the real big factor are his support for Trump and his weird and destructive antics these past few months. There was competition a year ago, buy it's only now that sales are really falling off a cliff.
I honestly don't think Tesla wil exist in a couple of years. Musk will have made the brand too toxic.
But no, it's not that. Surely anything but that! It's definitely a vague, complex web of market dynamics that's the real cause of the brand's downfall.
They win on efficiency (miles / kwh), but that’s about it at this point. Other manufacturers have better interiors (knobs and build quality, car play / android auto), form factors, etc.
Either that, or Elon would have been a serious problem for the company. Since they’re happening at the same time, it’s going to be rough.
I think the only people who care about this are people who care about politics in the first place or didn't already like Elon, which isn't everyone and probably not the majority.
Whilst Elon has some blame for Tesla's bad brand image, competition in Europe has made it so if you go Tesla your basically paying a premium for the brand and that's it, Tesla's in Europe iirc have self driving capability much less than the US.
One factor is that even if you think Musk was just mucking about or misunderstood, there is still the embarrassment of other people thinking your car choice endorses that.
The post had a number of grammatical errors too, so if "whilst" we're at it, should we criticize all of European education? Please don't post low-effort negative nationalism. It's cheap and the subject (the richest person alive is apparently a nazi) is a serious matter.
... You think the majority of people don't care about Nazi salutes? I mean, certainly if we're talking Europe, yeah, sorry, the majority of people do care about Nazi salutes.
I think, also, that the kind of sneering, what would you call it, implausible deniability maybe, thing the US far-right like to do where they do something outrageously and then smugly deny that they did it, works less well in Europe (I'm not sure why Americans are so tolerant of it, tbh).
Doing Nazi salutes might drive sales in the US, but this is the understatement of the year.
The rest of the US? Not so much.
If the falls were actually caused by Musks antics you would expect the inverse, with a larger effect in the US and attenuated effects in countries less invested in US politics.
Especially non-English speaking countries.
Why do they always try to make a taxi out of it? I mean Waymo, now Cybercab. I would gladly pay a high premium for such a car to be able to work on my laptop on the way from my home to the office while in a car. I don't mind the whole taxi concept for some cases but just not sure about focusing or taking a meeting call from a taxi with strangers.
Tesla's most productive factory is in Shanghai, and Tesla was doing great in the Chinese market.
It's not China's fault that Musk chose to prioritize the development of the Cyber Truck over new mass-market cars, and it's not China's fault that he's going around giving Nazi salutes on stage.
He did become the world's richest man and he bought himself and election so I wouldn't under estimate him.
The most vehement Trump supporters I know have been Musk fans since the time he supported Babylon Bee when they were kicked off Twitter.
They believe that the Climate Change stuff is all a big con to get government money, of course.
And those MAGA now have Tesla's and Starlink because.
no they don't. and the sales numbers prove it.
And the remaining 10% includes not just that they can't industrial-espionage their way to copying both product and launch vehicle, but also all the combined odds of "WW3" and "the US no longer exists" and the other less dramatic things that may stand in the way.
dropped a word
I don't like him. But I could see this happening
The vast majority of people are good, and we're finally seeing that spirit moving (about time!).
This would have been unthinkable a few years ago.
The Chinese EV's and hybrids are brilliant - the US market doesn't know what it's missing out on.
Edit: I just want to add a little grace here (got my Sunday suit on). I think Elon is probably the most interesting person you can ever hang out with most likely. He's definitely in a dark mindset atm, and I pray he gets out of it because it's not leading to a better world (and I know he once cared for this).
The main issue with conservatives is that they just don't like EVs and are much more skeptical about climate change.
The problem is the addressable market size. They traded the larger one (liberals with money and pro-EV opinions) for a much much smaller one (conservatives with money and pro-EV opinions).
The issue is that among conservatives with money, the primary opinion in their culture is anti-EV, so unless there is a pro-EV tipping soon point on that side, it's not likely that market will grow, or that it would even go to them vs more traditional auto-makers.
Stick a rather visible "What would Jesus do?" on your car.
C'mon, Kristallnacht? I'm not seeing any moves towards rounding up Tesla owners and sending them to camps. There's no political party carrying out organized pogroms against Tesla owners. No comparison whatsoever.
I've seen quite the opposite in liberal areas: a lot of empathy for neighbors who bought Teslas a while ago because many - Tesla owners or not - feel deceived by Elon.
That's how I feel about my neighbors with Teslas. None of them bought them with the intention of promoting techno-feudalism, and because it's an expensive product, they are stuck with it for a while.
Far less of a pass for cybertrucks. Even absent Elon's politics that thing is rolling fuck you to everyone else on the road.
I haven’t heard of that happening either.
Anyway people stuck with an old Tesla can just get an anti-musk bumpersticker.
Why not? I got one because I liked the look and it's a fantastic family car (and house power backup). I'm not "promoting techno-feudalism" or anything so sophisticated. For many of us, it's just a car. I simply like it and it does what my family needs in a car.
But because of all of the "ok fine, give the Tesla owners a pass but fuck the cybertrucks" people like you, I now get to worry about being assaulted for driving it or coming back to a vandalized, damaged car with my kids in tow. Hence the Kristallnacht-like comment.
This really is a case of trading a good addressable market for a much smaller one. Business-wise it makes no sense at all.
He could have kept out of politics and tried to capture both markets. Little fast cars for blue people, big ugly cars for red people. That's now totally impossible. It's one or the other.
Now let's look at the number of voters
Red counties tend to have smaller populations, but there are more of them. Those factors balance out to each of the groups having roughly 50% of the total voting population (contributing to close elections). If we assume the proportion of non-voters is the same in both groups, then the blue counties are over twice as economically productive per capita, which shouldn't be surprising given that the red counties tend to be rural and agrarian.
I'm not sure the turnout assumption holds, but I'm also not sure which way has lower voter turnout. This 2016 map of voter turnout by county (https://abag.ca.gov/sites/default/files/maps/motm_10_18_18_L...) suggests urban areas (e.g. bay area, NoVA, new england) have higher voter turnouts than rural areas, so the per capita numbers may be even more sharply skewed towards blue counties.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/08/24/absurb-cl...
They've started with the T, but they'll get to the other letters eventually.
Some have also been muttering about revisiting Lawrence v Texas (the Supreme Court decision which legalised homosexuality nationwide in the US in 2003).
Almost every claim that he makes, or that his supporters make about him, is wildly untrue, and definitely the claim that he's "the most pro gay". That's one of those many hollow claims people make about him in order to sway a few people from a demographic that's going to be hurt by him.
But the fact that he keeps getting away with it does make him a great con man.
I'm almost certain it's technically do-able. (For added fun, add the sound through some speakers.)
Leaving the rest of us with no jobs, stagflation, no government.
That's assuming that Bitcoin gains value disconnected from the US dollar/economy. That's not a given.
Short some industry just before tariffs are introduced that will hurt them.
Everyone in those groups would be behind a guy throwing Nazi salutes?
[1] https://electrek.co/2024/05/06/elon-musk-no-2-tesla-goes-bac...
My last car, a Ford Focus, passed the inspections on the first try for 13 years in a row
Tesla tried to copy British Leyland "that'll do" coachbuilding and failed miserably!
A guy who is worth hundreds of billions, and is willing to give Wikimedia a billion dollars to change their name to dickipedia, doesn’t care whether he makes an extra hundred from you or not.
Just buy the car you like.
Which car you buy makes a significant difference to your life, but virtually zero difference to shareholders of the automaker, so buy whatever car you want instead of spiting yourself.
while this is true for a single person, of course the opposite is true if there is a significant movement (like the one that appears we are experiencing) if significant number of people stay away from a certain car brand.
also, on the personal note - I am a Tesla owner and have planned on replacing my 11-year Tesla S with a new Model Y, my wife said “over my dead body” :) hence, even on personal side the car buying can be a moral issue - not necessarily thinking “CEO will soon be homeless due to my purchase of lucid vs model y” but "I won't contribute a single penny to perhaps one of the most vile human beings that currently walks on Earth
Yet I believe that when enough individuals make the same choice—whether at the ballot box or with their wallets—it creates meaningful impact. Collective consumer decisions send powerful signals to companies and their leadership, just as collective voting shapes our democracy.
I don't know the relative size of this industry compared to anywhere else.
Cars are incredibly expensive in Denmark (Not quite Singapore levels, but high). This, however, is more grounded in a cultural difference where walkable cities are preferred.
The US is incredibly car centric - to an extend where US trips can be directly read in my stress levels as measured on my watch. The US is so incredibly noisy and smelly.
where did you get that idea from?
Additional taxing is not handled in the EU. Cars are considerably more expensive in Denmark than Germany because taxes on cars are significantly higher in Denmar.
Personally every time I've rented a BYD (only the Atto admittedly) I've found the UI to be awful. The two Android screens are often out of sync on key information, and the interior looks like it was designed by Homer Simpson making a "future car".
1. https://evcentral.com.au/2024-australian-ev-sales-tesla-and-...
I think BYD makes a great car for a great price, but Tesla is still outselling them 5:1
It’s very obviously improving for BYD.
Are you confusing global revenue $ for Australia sales # ?
You stated it wasn’t getting better for byd. From the article:
BYD revenues in Q3 (July to September) 2024 were 201 billion yuan ($AU42.85 billion) – a record high for the brand and a jump of 24 per cent over the same period in 2023.
More on byds ascent from earlier this year: https://www.afr.com/companies/transport/byd-s-hybrid-ute-jum...
Going from not having market to be the no. 6 best selling is by definition getting better.
So yes you are wrong and sales are improving for byd.
If you’re going to try to correct someone, at least understand the actual argument that is being made instead of attacking strawman arguments.
The reason I brought the Atto3 was after talking to 4 or 5 Uber drivers with them who swore by them.
Tesla will not be able to solve FSD with their current approach. Even if Tesla were to solve it tomorrow, it will take YEARS to be approved (decades in Europe).
Teslas models are being outcompeted - not only by Chinese companies I might tell you.
And most of all... Tesla = Elon... And we all know he is losing his mind currently. Calling the Polish minister of foreign affairs a "little man". Suggesting that the US should leave NATO. You should see how much he tweets nowadays, and how little sleep he gets.
Elon Musk is Howard Hughes, about to move into his cinema and stay there for years.
It seems to me like when a young IT engineer comes on project running for 100 years, and starts to rewrite the core service in nodejs, because it will cost less to run it, or whatever - and you end up with half working production, because someone didint't understood, why the system is and was built how it was built, and what are the implications of changing it... It might work on greenfield project, but anything else will probably not survive such a 'expert' in charge.
I kinda want to buy a used Tesla now while they're cheap and stash it in the garage until this blows over. But I need it to keep getting software support.
but i've had the same thought as parent. if the 2nd hand market really dips, i'm not going to let dirty looks from strangers get in the way of a smart economic & ecological move for me
If Hitler and his loyalists were still around chilling in Argentina I'm sure Volkswagen wouldn't do so well.
He killed himself like the coward he was.
You lose maps, supercharger status, etc but the car still works fine.
The board's historically comped Elon on revenues, net income and stock price -- all those aren't that great compared with highs in the last five years. They are, however, astronomical compared to where Tesla was when they gave him his 'crazy' incentive stock plan. I imagine the board is probably repeatedly asking him to settle down, lower the drug intake and ... please don't make things worse bro. Maybe in stronger language than that. And, I'm sure if they think Tesla would be better off without Elon they'll work hard to make that happen. Right now, though is sort of peak anti-Elon sentiment in the public, making it harder to parse out what's helpful / where he's impacting his companies on the non-public side.
Personally I think it quite likely that Musk will catch significant blame for whatever bad things related to American government happen in the coming year, deserved or otherwise.
I think there's precedent with the OnStar system in other cars, and there has anecdotally been evidence of various systems being operable by some kind of admin terminal.
I think "summon mode" is actually a great demonstration of how you can remotely access and do some form of piloting the car without a driver. There's also the disabling of features remotely on resale, and probably other examples.
Even then you can always install an update that allows remote control.
He said «my heart goes out to you». Without a video of him saying that nobody would have blinked an eye at the contents of what he said. You know, content, the thing Martin Luther King said we should judge people by.
This is a pretty bad problem (or «strategy») with the modern left. They imagine something into existence, either now, or more commonly in a vague future.
They then base their political platform on these imagined or assumed things. They do this all the time.
The Elon nazi thing is probably the most extreme and obvious case I’ve seen of this, and I’m honestly shocked to see the amount of people taking it seriously.
The left should, like Bill Maher recently said, focus on providing a viable alternative instead of trying to see who can act the most unhinged.
It was a “haha only serious” Nazi salute. It’s not “unhinged” to see what’s plainly visible.
For you to act like it's 100% definitely misinformation rather than a judgement call is disingenuous to the extreme.
I’ll go on the unpopular limb and say that anyone seriously considering the fact that any mainstream persona intentionally did a «Nazi» thing has been consuming too much traditional, commercial media who almost by definition thrives on controversy and clicks. Their core interest is not in facts or honest reporting.
I don’t think HN is the most appropriate place for such discussions, but if anyone seriously wants to accuse Elon Musk of being a «Nazi», I would kindly request that they first define what they mean by that word in 2025, because to me that is honestly not very obvious.
He’s pro Israel and want less government regulation. I’m no expert, but to me that seems anti-Nazi?
To the rest of this, playing with Nazi shit to “trigger the libs” is a whole thing on the right, and I 100% think it’s what Elon was doing (and why we’ve seen more of it since, from others). The other explanations are bizarre (what the fuck is “my heart goes out to you”? The closest thing I can think of to that sort of gesture doesn’t risk this kind of confusion) and this kind of “trolling” is read as absolutely serious and a show of support by the worst elements of the right.
For my part, play with Nazi shit, you’re a Nazi, and so’s anyone who keeps associating with you. Most of the right didn’t run away from this, so we’ve got a pretty serious Nazi problem now.
I appreciate the honest response, I really do.
But right here is where I’ll have to go back to my original comment about imagining problems.
You imagine he did something Nazi like. You imagined there are big swaths of right wing people supporting this imagined Nazi act. You imagine a big Nazi problem.
And it could be all in your head.
Listen to Bill Maher: Focus on becoming a viable alternative, rather than chasing crazy things. The world can only benefit from more viable options at the next election.
If this were literally the only issue, idk, maybe? But there’s also the broader plan they’re implementing, and the normalization of wildly illegal action from the executive. It’s authoritarianism top to bottom, and they said exactly what they’re aiming to do.
I’m focusing on a lot of things, and the fact that Nazi salutes (it’s on video! He did it twice! Watch that again and tell me what would look different if that were in-fact what he’s doing. What the hell gesture even looks close to what he does, if not that? I find the denial of what we can all plainly see shocking, similar to attempts to deny what happened on January 6th which we watched live) are now “eh, it’s fine” for the Republican Party is not nothing.
Like we’re a multifaceted coup attempt and an “if I lose to Hillary, the 2nd amendment folks can do something about it” in, and we’re in the middle of “shock and awe” (their words) against the government bureaucracy, firing of the people charged with preventing much worse and who did prevent that last time (IGs, generals), 40ish days out from the publicly stated deadline for agency reports on whether Trump should invoke the insurrection act, and the richest dude in the world Nazi salutes on stage twice and people are still going “IDK”. Gimme a fucking break.
But yes the actual problem is I can tell what kind of gesture he very obviously made and find it repugnant. That’s the problem. Not that all the above is going on and people are still entertaining “he just meant ‘my heart goes out to you’, which one expresses with a firm grimace, a slap to the chest and quick extension of the arm, fucking exactly like a Nazi salute” as if it’s not obvious bullshit.
Elon obviously does not tick off every box for "Nazi", but he gets so many that a lot of people are understandably horrified.
The salute was, physically, a Nazi salute - as any video comparison clearly shows. And he did it twice. Maybe he didn't "mean" it - maybe it was ironic, maybe it was for kicks, but it obviously was one.
Add to that his support for far-right parties around the world. That includes Germany, and, yes, Israel - while historic Nazis were antisemites, but some far-right people today find common ground with the far-right in Israel, which is exactly who is in power there now.
And Elon is allied with Trump, who got elected after a campaign in which he demonized immigrants as "poisoning the blood" of the nation, said that (legal!) immigrants were "eating the cats and the dogs", etc. etc. Those are classic lines from far-right, fascist governments. Demonizing gay and trans people as well, and Elon has done plenty of that himself.
So, is Elon just "far-right" and not "Nazi"? I'm not sure it's worth debating the difference. Obviously literal card-carrying Nazis are in the past, but the overlap between the modern far-right and historical fascism is enormous.
Here's video of him doing it intentionally. Twice:
Then there wouldn’t even be room for this. But the man keeps finding himself questionable close to nazi adjacent shit far too often. It might be for lulz, but don’t be surprised when consumers back off your products.
I don't understand the gesture. It's not something I see myself ever doing. But here's Tim Walz doing the exact same thing on video. Evidence of secret NSDAP membership?
I tell ya what. Instead of trying to convince you of what you're wishing to be not true, try this: Pull up the video of the gesture he made, practice it at home, make sure you can duplicate it perfectly, and then go into work and do it in front of each person you meet, and come back here and tell us what happens.
His other grandfather was a well respected senior government minister.
( Who defended aparthied tooth and nail in the white South African Government )
A little historical background.
Still, if you like youtube material, the lyrics to songs they all grew up with in SA are telling enough: e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIGnIvL18_4&t=31s
As the twigs were bent ...
to Musk doing the nazi like gesture https://x.com/iam_smx/status/1881583500991889729
I think there's an obvious difference.
The board’s not doing anything
The timeline would like this for a Tesla owner:
- Tesla goes bankrupt
- Some Chinese company takes up the upkeep of the software
- They introduce ads similar to Jeep
- No core functionality or QoL improvements are made
- Abandonware, no real software updates
- Your car runs fine, but you paid for a car with a computer in it, and the business basically repossessed the computer part of it. So, if that's possible, it's better to avoid.
Regardless - even in this fairly far fetched reality - as you said the "car runs fine", but the GO was refering to the car "ceasing to function".
He wants power. Wealth is a route to power (money is ultimately a form of power) but it only goes so far. He maxed that out and now he’s finding other means.
I kind of have to sit back and laugh at the "I'm a genius / Oh no!" schadenfreude of his decision-making of late. Nevermind his present playbook is directly ripped from Bob Page (billionaire villain of Deus Ex), but seeing people tie themselves up into knots to still defend his "4D-Chess Brilliance" as he keeps footgunning his business enterprises just makes me facepalm at the sheer stupidity of these bootblacks.
The guy invested in an EV company and built a cult of personality around going lean, mean, and green with EVs. Sporty, well-built cars with tasteful interiors and designs, that also did away with the traditional American dealership model. That worked, because it was an objectively good idea. Then he cut costs, lost the plot, and did everything he could to game the share price rather than run a better car company. As a result, others began moving into the space and copying Tesla's M.O.: in-vehicle surveillance tech, cloud-required connectivity, a focus on digital features over physical reliability, cheaper materials at higher costs, etc. So now the car market is full of "pseudo-Teslas" that nobody can afford, and nobody really wants; if we're going to buy a cheap piece of junk, we can buy a used car with the advantage it won't spy on us.
He did the same thing with SpaceX: transformed the company into a payload juggernaut, lost the plot, invested into every ancillary market possible, threw out quality control, and seems content riding wave after wave of massive explosions instead of serious R&D and QA/QC while pivoting to internet service that's angering governments, environmentalists, and scientists alike.
I could repeat this with X and DOGE, but we all know the scorecard there. The dude has completely lost the plot, and is high on his own supply. He doesn't invest assuming failure and preparing for success, he invests assuming success and failure isn't a possibility (which, to be fair, is kind of true when you've captured weakened governments).
He's just a bad leader. Full stop. If his companies' boards weren't packed with boot-licking sycophants, they'd likely have tossed his butt out for doing drugs on multiple interviews like some sort of college drug dealer instead of a C-Suite visionary.
Is there really? In the sense of a global organized boycott spearheaded by a particular organization? I've not yet seen anything like that. It seems like instead the brand has just been damaged by Musk in the eyes of the kind of person who might be likely to buy an EV in the first place.
Furthermore, that has happened as their offerings have become stale in their primary markets - their old branding approach (techno-utopianism) has lost its appeal, but their new branding (techno-dystopianism) is turning most people off.
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/uk-new...
"According to Germany's road traffic agency, Tesla sold 1,429 cars in Germany, a decline of 76%, an even bigger decline than the 60% drop in January. Overall, sales of electric vehicles rose 30.8% to 35,949 in Germany."
"Tesla sales were down 24% in the Netherlands, 42% in Sweden, 48% in both Norway and Denmark, 45% in France, 55% in Italy, 10% in Spain and 53% in Portugal"
That's not the normal definition of boycott.
Usually boycott just means to refuse to buy from a particular vendor due to some reason other than cost-value of the product.
I dont know about "global" but there are certainly many regional groups boycotting american products in general, and musk doubly so.
"These authorities discourage, and in some circumstances, prohibit U.S. companies from taking certain actions in furtherance or support of a boycott maintained by a foreign country against a country friendly to the United States (unsanctioned foreign boycott)."
So it's about US companies and foreign governments, not individual consumers purchase decisions
One of the biggest hammers to the hypothetical boycott is this office which effectively criminalizes any company from partaking (going so far as to have to prove they considered the boycotted party for all deals / contracts / purchases / etc.)
Otherwise not much. Part of the risk in investing is that you might invest in a company with shitty management. If you made a bad investment (except in very extreme cases which this probably doesnt cross the line into) that is your fault. Investing is not the same thing as free money.
When you buy a Tesla you're enriching a megalomaniac who wants to control members of congress by threatening to primary them [1], and control judges by threatening to impeach them [2].
[1] https://www.msnbc.com/top-stories/latest/trump-elon-musk-pri...
[2] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/american...
It's too bad for Elon that their new buddies in Russia aren't much into electric cars. Even Chinese companies mainly export petrol powered ones there due to lack of demand for EV's.
Or… Google around for cases of vandalism of the cars and the dealers. Maybe review some of the protest language. Pretty sure “politically charged” misses the point by several orders of magnitude.
I'm not sure how that justifies terrorism. Anyone destroying public or private property needs to be arrested by the police and sent to court.
Like I said, ANYONE causing property damage needs to face justice, regardless of political orientation or motivation. There are no heroes or patriots in such actions, only criminals. I don't want to live in a society where such actions are tolerated, and neither do you.