Surveys conducted by Caliber and T-Online both show a sharp drop in favorability for Tesla among Germans. Sales in the first two months of this year plunged a combined 71% amid controversy over Musk’s embrace of the AfD as well as a scheduled production shutdown.
In an affluent residential neighborhood of Berlin, four Tesla vehicles burnt to a crisp in the early morning hours of Friday after unknown vandals set them ablaze.
This latest act of arson to engulf CEO Elon Musk’s cars is now being investigated by a special commission for its likely political motive, according to the city’s police department.
Symbolically it’s another blow to the complicated love affair between Musk and a country that is home to his only manufacturing plant in Europe, located less than an hour away from the crime scenes.
While the four burnt cars are perhaps the most vivid manifestation of Germans turning their back, surveys suggest consumers in Europe’s largest economy are deserting the brand over Musk’s embrace of President Donald Trump and the populist far right.
“The correlation with Musk’s behavior cannot be overlooked,” Shahar Silbershatz, head of the Danish market research firm Caliber, told the country’s leading business daily Handelsblatt.
His team has been polling Germans on their opinion of Tesla for months. In August, shortly after Musk endorsed Trump, 31% considered purchasing a Tesla as their next car.
That dropped to just 16% in January amid Trump’s inauguration and the scandal around Musk’s stiff-armed gesture that prompted comparisons to a Nazi salute. February does however showed a slight rebound to 20%, according to the paper on Monday.
After a catastrophic January and February, March should see an improvement
That is still far more positive than an informal survey by T-Online last week that asked Germans whether they would buy a Tesla. More than 94% responded ‘no’ while just 3% claimed they still would.
Although it was not conducted with the usual rigor a professional polling firm like Caliber and therefore not statistically representative, it was notable for the fact that a record number participated, with roughly 100,000 voting through the website.
Directionally that suggests the brand is losing ground in Germany, which is tied with the U.K. as Europe’s largest EV market with roughly 380,000 vehicles sold last year.
The latest sales data supports this. In January registrations of new Teslas plunged 60%, a descent that accelerated to 76% in February.
Part of this is due to the changeover from the original Model Y, far and away the brand’s best-seller, to a slightly newer version that debuted this month. In the process, Tesla’s factory outside Berlin shut down for a period to prepare the assembly line.
Some customers will have also postponed a purchase in order to wait for the refresh, so March results will most likely see a sharp improvement over the steep plunge witnessed in the first two months.
Images of Musk’s controversial salute may fall foul of German laws
The direction of recent polls suggests Tesla will struggle to claw back lost market share given the growing number of competitor models. A swathe of Germans are infuriated by his failed attempt to install the far-right in power in last month’s election.
It’s a remarkable fall from grace for entrepreneur Musk, who took a big gamble in choosing high wage Germany for the site of his third vehicle factory.
When the country’s domestic carmakers preferred setting up new manufacturing plants in countries like Hungary to capitalize on Eastern Europe’s lower labor costs, Musk invested billions to build his site on a patch of land on the outskirts of Berlin.
Germany’s often high level of bureaucracy—including the full print out of tens of thousands of pages of permitting applications for record keeping—didn’t deter him. Neither did the opposition from some groups protesting the plant’s impact on the local water supply.
Yet the Tesla factory, which has contributed significantly to the region’s otherwise weak economy, has become a symbol of Musk, and not just the company. Last month it served as the backdrop to a protest with an image of the CEO’s stiff-armed salute projected onto the building alongside the words, “Heil, Tesla”.
The salute is strictly forbidden in Germany. Even the image itself as a political statement against Musk could potentially fall foul of local laws.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
