European EV sales are really taking off with booming sales.
BYD’s sales grew 94 percent to 4,436, Polestar was up 84 percent to 2,405, and newcomer XPeng logged 1,034 sales, representing an increase of 259 percent from February 2024. The best-performing brand in terms of EV sales, however, was VW, whose registrations boomed 180 percent to 19,600. The German brand’s ID.4 was the third-best-selling EV… and VW,’s ID.7 and ID.3 were in fifth and sixth spot, separated from the ID.4 by Renault’s Car of the Year-winning 5.
Meanwhile, it’s really hard not to notice how Tesla campaigns to boost a German political party (AfD) affiliated with Nazism had a direct impact on the European market.
Tesla’s sales are diving headfirst into the red. In France, deliveries were down 59.4 percent compared to April last year, with just 863 vehicles sold. Denmark saw a 67.2 percent decrease, bringing the monthly total there to only 180 cars. But, as reported by Reuters, Sweden takes the prize for most dramatic plunge: sales dropped 80.7 percent, from 1,052 units last April to just 208 this year.
Europeans, still picking shrapnel from their grandparents’ photo albums, are teaching Tesla a sales collapse lesson that makes the Hindenburg disaster look like a successful landing.
Do you know who completely distances themselves from Nazism? Billionaire Germans.
…siblings Stefan Quandt and Susanne Klatten own more than 40% of BMW and are worth about $38 billion [thanks to their family operating] …battery factories in Berlin, where, thousands of forced slave laborers were used, including female slave laborers from concentration camps, you learn nothing about [this] history.
They hide their Nazism so they can keep all the money from it. Which goes to show how stupid Tesla was to attempt to out-Nazi the billionaires behind German brands born out of Nazism.
Buying a Tesla in Europe today is about as socially acceptable as an AfD politician goose-stepping in a SS uniform through Anne Frank’s house. Who wants that? Or more to the point, what would Knut Lier Hanson do with a Tesla today?
Nazi children who grew up in Germany under Allied occupation know better than to build fleets of Swasticars.
Musk, meanwhile, was raised in apartheid South Africa where segregation wasn’t a shameful historical footnote but a lifestyle choice—like the family had rooted for Nazism, thought it delightful even after defeat, and decided to emigrate to its last remaining franchise location.
They amassed wealth that would later fuel Musk’s political ambitions such as big AfD campaigns. In a November 2024 interview, his father Errol Musk claimed that Elon’s maternal grandparents “support Hitler and all that sort of stuff” and were “part of the Nazi, the German party in Canada” before moving to South Africa because they supported the apartheid regime. As one reporter described, the Musk family lived “what can only be described as a neocolonial life” in post-colonial Africa with servants and extensive property holdings including emerald mine investments that generated significant wealth through exploitative labor practices. This heavily curated avoidance of Allied victory and occupation shaped his worldview, clearly influencing his business practices and political positions as if Hitler didn’t commit suicide.