Tesla sales are continuing their decline worldwide.
The carmaker is still grappling with the severe damage CEO Elon Musk has dealt to its brand following an incredibly unpopular embrace of far-right ideologies and a chaotic pay-for-play attempt to gut the federal government’s budget.
Sales figures, particularly in Europe and China, are looking grim. The carmaker sold 15 percent fewer cars in China last month than a year earlier, as Reuters reports.
Across Europe, sales are still in freefall, dropping 36 percent in Germany and 45 percent in the UK — despite a significant rise in EV registrations in May.
But one European nation, interestingly, is bucking the trend. Tesla sales in Norway have surged a massive 213 percent year over year — primarily the result of the brisk sales of the company’s latest version of its Model Y SUV, which was released earlier this year.
“The Tesla Model Y has sold well and is popular in Norway, likely because it is good value for money and because it meets Norwegians’ needs for large luggage space, high ground clearance, all-wheel drive, and a tow hitch,” Norwegian EV Association secretary general Christina Bu told CNBC.
EV incentives are also still widely available, making electric car ownership in the Scandinavian nation highly lucrative. (Norway, though progressive in many regards, also has a long history of white nationalism that could be driving sympathy for some of Musk’s most extreme beliefs.)
Despite the spike in sales, though, it’s likely Tesla’s sales in Norway would actually be better without Musk’s provocations.
“As many as 43 percent stated that they would not buy a Tesla for political reasons,” Bu said. “We can therefore only speculate how much Tesla would have sold without Musk’s support for the MAGA movement and the Trump administration.”
And Norway is still an extreme outlier as Tesla’s crisis continues to deepen. The carmaker’s first-quarter earnings were even worse than analysts feared, revealing back in April that its net income had slid an astonishing 71 percent since the first quarter of last year.
The company is also still reeling from Donald Trump’s tariffs, which have driven up costs of imported auto parts, a reality that seemingly only dawned on Musk after he came by the company for a visit in late April.
Meanwhile, Musk has bet the future of the company on the establishment of a fully autonomous robotaxi ride-hailing service and a humanoid robot, dubbed Optimus.
But given the largely unfinished and potentially fatally flawed driver assistance software the company’s still working on, it’s unlikely service will expand any time soon beyond a handful of human driver-supervised vehicles in a suburb of Austin, Texas.
The competition, particularly in China, is also really starting to heat up. Chinese EV maker BYD eclipsed Tesla by passing the $100 billion mark in revenue last year, showing that Musk has his work cut out for him to keep his carmaker alive.
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