I suspect the reasons for Tesla’s sales slump have less to do with Elon’s political views and more to do with the fact that the EV market has generally been stoked by hype as opposed to tangible value.
Tesla said that it delivered 1.64 million vehicles in 2025, down 9% from a year earlier.
For the fourth quarter, sales totaled 418,227, falling short of the 440,000 that analysts polled by FactSet expected. The sales total was impacted by the expiration of a $7,500 tax credit that was phased out by the Trump administration at the end of September.
I suspect the gullible suckers pool, fed by government subsidies, has pretty much dried up. Quel surprise!
I drove a Tesla two weeks ago.
It was the best, most amazing vehicle I’ve ever drove.
Would I buy one? Yes.
Would I drive it daily? Yes.
Would it be my primary vehicle? Yes.
Would I drive it cross-country? Not yet.
Would I replace all of my ICE cars with it? No.
For some things, I like a gasoline car. I can drive several hundred miles in a day, with one 5 minute stop to refuel. Also, gasoline cars work great in winter.
But, yeah, the Tesla was awesome. It’s definitely the future.
The future … maybe. My wife’s friend got a Tesla and lived with it for about 18 months. Her husband had bot it for her and thought she would love it but she got fed up with it and said “get rid of the Tesla and get me a real fu@%king car!!”
I think she got a Nissan Rogue.
I wouldn’t be so fast to sing the praises of an electric car until u live with one day in and day out and put up with the crap heaters and the nonexistent winter range and the hassles of charging if u ever try to go anywhere … ie get away from the charge at home routine.
My brother in-law has an EV and it is just a grocery getter …. they won’t leave town with the POS …. a real car for this boy thank you although my winter car is an Acura Sport Hybrid RLX with an electric range of about 2 km when conditions are right but it only charges when u hit the brakes or coasting ie no plug in.
” my winter car is an Acura Sport Hybrid RLX with an electric range of about 2 km when conditions are right but it only charges when u hit the brakes or coasting ie no plug in.”
My neighbour had a plugin hybrid that really worked well…saved him a lot of gas money and was dirt-cheap to charge.
“was dirt cheap to charge.”
That will not be the case when/if 100-plus million passenger vehicles and 20 million transport trucks in North America electrify. The grid will certainly not be able to handle that kind of demand. It can barely keep up with today’s needs.
I will consider an EV when they are finally equipped with a radioisotope thermoelectric generator instead of batteries.
Teslas all have a major design flaw. A giant touchscreen control for all critical vehicle operations. It’s simply unsafe, and in my opinion, nobody should be allowed to drive a Tesla (or any other touchscreen car) without having a specific drivers test which teaches and observes how and when drivers are distracted from heads-up driving by staring at and fiddling with their touchscreen.
It’s illegal in my state to hold a cellphone in your hands … but touchscreen controls are OK? Ridiculous. Distracted driving kills. And the touchscreen distracts as much as anything.
As per your own comments an EV won’t be part of the future until they have better range, take only 5 mins to recharge, and work as well as ICE vehicles in the winter. Battery powered electric heaters won’t work efficiently in our very cold climate. Plus, they will need to cost about as much as an ICE vehicle and they will also need to be able to be charged by people who live in apartment buildings. None of these things are possible until there is a big change in the technology. People need to realize that the government’s goal is to eliminate private vehicle ownership by the masses not try to make it possible and easy to continue to own one.
No…it isn’t.
I stay awake some nights wondering what the man with the 160 IQ knows about the “tangible value” of his EVs that the Joe Lunchbuckets of North America seem to be struggling with?
Not unlike wind turbines…take away the subsidies they’d all fold like cheap suits.
Good thing for Musk he has more money than God.
” …. take away the subsidies they’d all fold like cheap suits”
Amen.
Yet somehow tesla is the most valuable car company in the world?
Ford sold 2 million vehicles in the US alone.
It’s a tech company, not a car company.
They also get to sell ZEV credits to other companies so that they can still sell ICE vehicles in California, working out to around $1.5 billion in revenue. Presumably those can also be sold to Quebec companies who are under the Carbon Credit Market scheme with California.
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/renewables/tesla-loses-title-as-worlds-biggest-electric-vehicle-maker-as-sales-fall-for-second-year-in-row/articleshow/126308390.cms
Boo hoo … Tesla is no longer #1 in EV sales. But BYD is a communist Chinese company who “sells” their EV’s for half the price of the cheapest Tesla. And since communist China isn’t a capitalist economy … I wonder how many of those reported “sales” are simply cars stored in some giant parking lot in Changquing?
Chinese EV’s are so prone to battery fires that there are a whole slew of YouTube channels that document them in an amusing fashion. There were a couple of risk takers on Mainland China that were somehow sending out the videos from there before one of them got arrested (and likely work camped).
China has, also, been applying their EV car manufacturing to Mexico with the hopes of saturating the market to Central and South America. This issue will be addressed this year in the trade negotiations with Mexico. One of the reasons that Canada and China have that ongoing tariff war on soy and rape seed is that China wants unlimited access to selling EV’s in Canada.
Whether an EV is expensive or cheap they just won’t work efficiently (or even at all) in Canada’s very cold climate. A battery powered car with a battery powered electric heater is useless at -20 and colder. Why don’t people understand this? Nobody makes battery powered electric heaters for a reason. I was still working at a Nissan dealer when the Leaf came out. My first question was ‘How does it’s heater work?’ When I heard it was battery powered I knew they had no future here with that technology.
L – Maybe, the unsold E,V. autos are being stored in the empty condo/apt. towers that China is famous for? Or stored in The Hidden City?
There is irony, when the nation, with the largest manufacturing economy in the world, is also the source for the (gain of function) Covid-19 Pandemic. The Lockdowns/mandates resulted in world wide economic slowdowns, supply chain disruptions and massive inflationary debt spending by mostly Western nations. Those, who consumed so much of China’s manufactured goods. Now, their widespread economic recessions, causing reduced demand for the more expensive of said goods, are being felt in China.
What goes around comes around. The Karma principle of biological warfare should have been included in The Art of War! Under a heading: The Law of unintended consequences.
“China’s EV Market Is Imploding”
Beijing’s grand ambitions threaten to take down the global car industry.
By Michael Schuman, The Atlantic, Nov 11, 2025.
“In China, you can buy a heavily discounted “used” electric car that has never, in fact, been used. Chinese automakers, desperate to meet their sales targets in a bitterly competitive market, sell cars to dealerships, which register them as “sold,” even though no actual customer has bought them. Dealers, stuck with officially sold cars, then offload them as “used,” often at low prices. The practice has become so prevalent that the Chinese Communist Party is trying to stop it. Its main newspaper, The People’s Daily, complained earlier this year that this sales-inflating tactic “disrupts normal market order,” and criticized companies for their “data worship.”
This sign of serious problems in China’s electric-vehicle industry may come as a surprise to many Americans. The Chinese electric car has become a symbol of the country’s seemingly unstoppable rise on the world stage. Many observers point to their growing popularity as evidence that China is winning the race to dominate new technologies. But in China, these electric cars represent something entirely different: the profound threats that Beijing’s meddling in markets poses to both China and the world.
Bloated by excessive investment, distorted by government intervention, and plagued by heavy losses, China’s EV industry appears destined for a crash. EV companies are locked in a cutthroat struggle for survival. Wei Jianjun, the chairman of the Chinese automaker Great Wall Motor, warned in May that China’s car industry could tumble into a financial crisis; it “just hasn’t erupted yet.”
To each his own.
But I don’t want my stolen tax dollars to subsidize battery cars and I want the owners to pay some type of equitable fuel tax.
As Kenji writes, the giant computer screen in a Tesla is retarded. The big screen in a car is called a windshield.
“equitable fuel tax”. I had suggested a couple of years back that the road tax could be applied in the battery charging. Anyone installing a home charging station would need to have a separate meter for it. The power bill for the separate charging station would have a per kWh amount added to cover the road tax. That would be better than paying a flat fee at re-registration time, which is the current case in some jurisdictions.
No tax is equitable.
Big Bro just wastes it anyway.
Annoying, angering, or otherwise ticking off roughly half of your potential customer base is not a wise choice.
It didn’t work for Hillary Clinton. It didn’t work for Budweiser. It’s not working for Elon Musk.