Germany is so over electric car maker Tesla, according to a recent poll, and the company can thank CEO Elon Musk for the cold shoulder.
A new T-Online poll found that of 100,000 Germans, 94 percent said they would not buy a Tesla. Only 3 percent said they’d still consider the purchase.
Earlier this month Forbes reported that German Tesla sales in February dropped by 76 percent. It’s not just a coincidence or a fluke of the EV industry — electric vehicle registrations in Germany increased by 32 percent during the same time period that Tesla sales dropped.
While not all of Tesla’s woes can be placed in Musk’s lap — EV competition has been increasing for years — Musk’s political antics certainly haven’t seemed to help his company.
Musk has voiced support for the far-right AfD political party in Germany, even hosting a call with supporters and telling them to “move beyond” their “past guilt.” During the call, he told AfD backers that “children should not be guilty of the sins of their parents, let alone their great-grandparents” in an apparent reference to the nation’s Nazi past.
It did not help that his call to move past the Nazis came just two days before Holocaust Remembrance Day.
The Tesla CEO also didn’t win many fans in Germany after throwing a salute during Donald Trump’s inauguration ceremony that many described as a “Nazi” salute. His defenders — including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — waved off the criticism, with some saying Musk’s gesture was simply a “Roman” salute.
Musk himself responded to the controversy by sharing a bunch of Nazi puns.
Tesla has faced backlash in the U.S. as well. Protests at Tesla showrooms have cropped up in response to Musk’s work as the head of the “Department of Government Efficiency,” which has spent most of its short existence gutting the federal workforce and accessing US citizens’ private information.
Some have taken their fury further, with incidents of vandalism of Tesla vehicles and at Tesla showroom locations.
During an all-hands employee livestream on Thursday, Musk tried to reassure his employees and told them not to sell their stock in the company.
“If you read the news it feels like, you know, Armageddon,” Musk said according to a CNBC report. “It’s like, I can’t walk past the TV without seeing a Tesla on fire. Like what’s going on? Some people, it’s like, listen, I understand if you don’t wanna buy our product, but you don’t have to burn it down. That’s a bit unreasonable.”
He urged his detractors to “stop being psycho.”
In the meantime, Trump and his Attorney General, Pam Bondi, said anyone convicted of vandalizing a Tesla or Tesla property would be treated as a domestic terrorist and even threatened on Truth Social to ship them off to the president’s preferred migrant gulag in El Salvador.
