KEY POINTS
New European car registrations of Tesla vehicles totaled 8,837 in July, down 40% year-on-year, according to the European Automobile Manufacturers Association, or ACEA.
BYD recorded 13,503 new registrations in July, up 225% annually.
Elon Musk’s automaker faces a number of challenges in Europe, including intense ongoing competition and reputational damage to the brand.
It’s because people are waiting for the new model Y. 🤣🤣🤣
Japan has generally been really underwhelming in the EV market, offering mostly Hybrids. While I hear Hyundai is cheap in USA, that is not really the case in EU, a Huyndai is as expensive as a VW. Stellantis is a crap show, they continuously offer too little too late and overcharge for it.
VW group is really killing it here in Denmark 7 out of top 10 most sold models are from VW group here, and I think in most of EU it’s mostly similar, because they offer cars with a very strong combination of range quality and attractive price.
VW has the lowest rate of errors at German mandatory biannual safety check published by TÜV, with for instance Tesla failing 7 times more often, With nearly 15% failure rate!!
In Denmark it’s even worse for Tesla with 30% of model 3 failing after 4 years!!! (first mandatory check) And Tesla even rejecting repair under warranty.
The faults aren’t minor either, they are serious faults in brakes, suspension and steering! No other brand is nearly is bad as Tesla in safety checks! The average rate is 11% so Tesla is about 3 times worse than average!!
https://fdm.dk/nyheder/nyt-om-biler/2025-01-populaer-tesla-model-dumper-med-et-brag-til-syn
The Kia EV3 and Picanto are pretty popular in the Netherlands nowadays, which are basically just a Hyundai in disguise.
The KIA EV3 was very well received by the press here, and won car of the year first price with Skoda Elroq as #2.
But in sales the Skoda Elroq beat the KIA EV3 with the Elroq as #1 and the EV3 as #3.
KIA Picanto is a model that has been reasonably popular here, is that available as BEV now?
Here BEV clearly dominate the market. I think all of top 10 cars sold are BEV.
https://mobility.dk/nyheder/juli-boed-paa-markant-fremgang-i-bilsalget-elbiler-fortsat-i-front-men-usikkerhed-om-bilpriser-venter/
I think I wrote 7 of top 10 were VW group, turns out it was actually 8 out of 10.
With KIA EV3 and Renault R5 being the only 2 that are not from VW group. And the VW T-Roc and Cupra Leon as the only non BEV.
Also note that despite BEV is absolutely dominant, Tesla is completely out of top 10 now.
If you don’t have a translator in your browser, I can copy paste a translation of the article for you.
Just for fun, you might try to “decode” the Danish text, and be surprised how much you can understand. I sometimes do that with Dutch, and knowing English and German and having Danish as a native language, I can understand about 80% 😋 , but it’s slow as hell.
It’s so bizarre to me that Toyota in particular isn’t a bigger player in the EV market after they were the first to get a mass market hybrid going. They were halfway there before anyone else, why’d they stumble so badly?
Two things I think. They gambled on fuel cells because it offers an easier solution at a time when charging stations were rare. It’s Tesla becoming popular very quickly followed by VW going all out on EV that really caught them on the backfoot. The second thing is that they underestimated the level of change to battery technology. They (at the time correctly) stated that for every 10 EV’s, they could make 90 hybrids. While that is still valid, the battery technology has evolved significantly and become cheaper in the process. Even 2 years ago you couldn’t find an EV in Europe for under 30k €, now there are several cars to choose from and not only Chinese cars either.
No one stumbled at Toyota. They sell more hybrids than all the EVs combined. Toyota makes money. Most companies lost money on EVs.
Because the Japanese government 25 years ago encouraged Japanese manufacturers to develop Hydrogen cars, that never went anywhere.
Only Nissan had an early effort on BEV with the leaf, but it was underwhelming, always the battery was too small, because they thought it was more important to keep the price down, and sell it as a secondary city car, than make an actually useful battery electric car.
For all their faults, Tesla did show the way, that it was possible to make good battery electric cars, instead of the flimsy comedic electric toy cars that were common at the time Tesla introduced the model S.
However the Hydrogen car may actually still be the future, that future is just not yet, because the price and loss of energy making hydrogen are too high, so hydrogen is not a good option until we have huge amounts of surplus energy from renewable sources that are otherwise wasted. At that point hydrogen may make a comeback as an excellent buffer to even out the difference in production to consumption of renewable energy.
But on the other hand, batteries may be so widespread at that point, that we may just use huge batteries to do the same.
In my household we have a 7.5 kWh battery that charges from our solar panels, that can last us ½ a day, easily enough to last the night over during summer. Imagine if we used a cheap used 100 kWh battery from a car instead. That would be enough to last us a whole week! At such a point the variance of renewables will be easily compensated by battery parks.
Hydrogen will however be superior for planes. Because hydrogen cells are lighter for the same energy than batteries, and the hydrogen can even be used directly in a jet engine with no harmful emissions. But we are probably still more than a decade away from that becoming main stream, although there are already examples of using it.
So all in all Toyota arrived this year with their first attractive BEV. And they will absolutely be a major player soon.
Oh wow, I had completely forgotten about all the hydrogen car experiments! There was even an actual functioning hydrogen bus system for a little while in a city not too far from me
According to owners and Consumer reports, Teslas are relatively far below industry average for reliability. While everyone is encouraged by new battery longevity, the motors fail at very high rates.
All true, but North America does not have mandated safety inspections for cars. They are used until they fall apart and kill people.
It depends, some states in the USA do have safety inspections, but most don’t. I can’t speak for any of the other north American countries though.
VW has been getting some flak for being more expensive to maintain than for instance Tesla, but clearly it makes a difference, VW is doing better in checks than Toyota, that many Americans consider the most reliable car brand.
Tesla’s high failure rate is primarily due to rust on the brakes from people using regen. Rust will form on all brakes if left unused, it’s just a matter of using them. There was also an issue with the front suspension that required a service bulletin at the time that was legit, but wasn’t a saftey thing.
There’s a few things that could lead to Tesla having higher rust rates over other EVs
Either way on an EV, you need to use your brakes on occasion or rust will form. Using the brakes clears the rust.
Edit: Essentially, this is a case of the facts are true, but the facts don’t always tell the whole truth. If you walk away from reading about this report thinking Tesla is the least reliable car, you’ve been mislead, unintentionally or not.
This is not true, although it is a common point of failure for Electric vehicles, it is not the primary fault, slack in the steering is.
Rust on the brakes is a very well known issue for all electric cars. Problem for Tesla is that the first security check coincide with the last service check under warranty.
Regulation regarding rust on the brake discs is very clear, and trivial to fix. So why wasn’t it fixed?
There was also a common issue with suspension.
No matter what or why a 30% failure rate is insane. The best cars (from VW) have only just above 2% failure rate!!
This is true, and has been widely publicized here in all newspapers, so mostly any owner of an electric car should know that.
But more obviously the Tesla service should absolutely have known, and fixed the issue before the mandatory safety check.
Again no other car is even close to as bad as Tesla.
It’s not something to “fix” like that.
It’s there one day and its not the next. If it’s there, you fail.
It just depends on if you’re using them or not and the weather at the time. If you take the time to go to a shop for a pre-inspection (not everyone will), and they see rust, they’ll just tell you to go use your brakes. That’s the fix.
Tesla wasn’t going to be last if not for this rust issue.
Edit: Just to be more clear - If you drive your car in the rain, park it for a few days or even overnight and check it, you’ll have rust. You don’t fix that in any way other than using them. OEMs don’t just fix that.
First that is simply wrong, did you not see the biggest point of failure is in the steering? The brakes are not what makes Tesla worst, it’s the general shitty quality and service.
Tesla wouldn’t be last if they didn’t have any faults… duh.
Tesla is so much worse than everybody else in several regards, remove the brake problem and they would still be worst. Also it’s completely irrelevant, if Tesla has this issue more than other cars it makes them worse. You might as well say they aren’t bad except for the wheels falling off all the time.
Other brands exist under the same physical laws, but don’t have as many issues as Tesla, also these issue for Tesla are not isolated to Denmark, in Germany we see a similar picture, Tesla has higher failure rate than any other brand.
Oh shit, I didn’t realize this was Denmark, i was thinking of the German one. In the German one, Tesla was only 1-2% above the next worst one which wasn’t an EV. And the reason Tesla would have more issues with rust is the reasons I listed above.
Where do you see the actual numbers/ranking the article you posted doesn’t show that, but the first thing it calls out is brakes (among all the others)
Edit this is the quote from the article
I tried to find an article with better info, but I couldn’t, the info was available a couple of months ago. Search engines just wont give me those articles.
But IMO it doesn’t really matter if it’s rust on the brakes, the brakes need to work in emergencies where regenerative braking is not enough.
You don’t get a pass for not using your brakes much in your daily driving. It’s a serious safety issue and not just some minor thing that isn’t important.
Tesla not having this under control shows that Tesla is not a good brand for safety.
It’s not a serious saftey issue at the level that would fail the car.
If you are gung ho on regen and never use/clear your brakes, you could definitely get to the point of it being legitimately dangerous, and that 100% needs to be found during an inspection and resolved, but that’s not what’s happening here in a lot of cases. This isn’t a OEM problem, it’s driver education around something entirely new problem. (edit: There are a lot of signs that something is wrong before it gets dangerous.)
That’s weird statement when it clearly does, and you even claimed yourself it was the main reason for failing for Tesla.