A survey of over 100,000 Germans revealed that 94% won’t buy a Tesla vehicle. It doesn’t bode well for the automaker, whose sales had already been falling off a cliff in the important European market.
In 2024, Tesla saw a 41% reduction in sales in Germany compared to 2023 despite EV sales surging 27% during the year.
This has already raised red flags about Tesla’s future in Germany, but it is nothing compared to Tesla’s performance so far in 2025.
Tesla’s sales were down 70% in the first two months of 2025, and again, that’s compared to its already poor performance in 2024.
Ehhh…
So, normally, you want a random sample in polls, which is very unlikely to not be representative of the population as a whole. If they have 100k people, it very probably isn’t a random sample, because you only normally take something like 1k to 2k people for randomly-sampled polls; there’s a rapidly-declining value above that. If the sample set is self-selected rather than randomly-selected, you can get results that are pretty different from the population as a whole.
fires up Google Translate
While I can’t seem to get the survey page to load, the domain it’s on is apparently t-online.de; it sounds like it’s a reader survey, which won’t be random.
Very important point, just one technical remark, because I see this a lot: You don’t necessarily want or need random samples in surveys. What you want is a probability sample, which means that you know the probability with which a person enters the sample. A random sample is a special type of probability sample, where each person has the same probability to enter the sample.
The large sample used for this “survey” in the OP is a convenience sample, which is a non-probability sample, where the persons’ probabilities to enter the sample are simply unknown. And this is often not a useful basis for a survey, because it’s affected by all sorts of response biases that are difficult to adjust for in non-probability samples.
Yeah. The important and encouraging part is that 70% drop of a 41% drop, while other electric cars are gaining.
Also 94% of people say they wont buy a product says nothing as a metric, unless before substantially more said so.
Also if hypothetically Tesla sold their cars to 6% of Germanys adult population, that is like 4-5 million cars.
With 100k size, and no evidence this was deliberately tilted, this is definitely huge.
Unfortunately your link doesn’t show the poll that I can see. So I don’t know the specifics.
But if it’s among mobile users, there is no reason they should be particularly biased one way or the other.
If this is reasonably accurate, we can expect Tesla market share to decline further. AFAIK it was about 4% in January in Germany.
There are lots of reasons to not buy a Tesla, and now fear of vandalism may keep people away who don’t really care about the politics. Which could explain the high number that state they won’t buy a Tesla. Most of them are probably not even in the market for a car though. So it’s not just a Tesla they won’t buy.