Volkswagen has overtaken Tesla as Europe's top EV seller
Volkswagen has overtaken Tesla as Europe's top EV seller
Volkswagen EV registrations rose more than 150% year-over-year while Tesla saw the biggest decline among the top 30 brands.
Summary
- Volkswagen beat Tesla in European EV sales across the first three months of 2025, data shows.
- Registrations for VW EVs are up more than 150%, while Tesla lost huge ground.
- However, the Model Y and Model 3 remain Europe's top two most-registered EVs.
In fact it's even more crazy if you consider VW group:
Tesla Total 53,237
VW Group:
VW 65,679
Audi 34,739
Skoda 26,578
Cupra (SEAT) 18,878
Porsche 9,929VW Group total 155,803
ratio 155803/53237 = 2.93
VW group has almost 3 times higher sales than Tesal!!https://www.carscoops.com/2025/04/vw-finally-beats-tesla-outselling-it-in-q1-ev-sales-in-europe/
PS:
Stellantis:
Peugeot 24,397
Citroen 16,367
Opel 13,612
FIAT 6,825
Stellantis Total 61,201Stellantis manages to clearly beat Tesla too!!
Edit: I forgot FIAT in the Stellantis numbers.
On my second ID4, and the wife has our first ID3. Lovely cars to drive, will never go back to an ice car again.
Why a second? Your first couldn’t have been any more than 5 years old.
3 year PCP deals
What's your opinion on used ID4s from 2021ish? Used ones are surprisingly cheap to get and I'm a little unsure why that is
We'd a 211 ID4 and it was a lovely car. It was in perfect condition when we traded it in last year. How cheap are ye talking? High km on it?
After Krasnov was elected, all big ticket items are on hold for at least two years. Bravo Volkswagen Group kicking Tesla in the nutsacks. Carry on!
Although I love the positivity, this is more a story about Tesla than VW.
Somewhat amazed they've rebounded this much given the VW emission scandal some years back. Guess it wasn't that brand-damaging after all.
Barely made a dent commercially, but put the company in a difficult financial situation where build quality was a bit lower and cars a bit more expensive for a while.
The point of these punishments should never be to kill a company, but to hurt investors, who are ultimately responsible for setting the CEOs agenda.
And, well, VW stock is still down about -80% compared to pre-dieselgate. So I would say eurocapitalism working as intended.
At the time, news reports credited the scandal with forcing VW to start investing in EVs. Without that scandal, they’d still be struggling to get started
VW are all time cunts, but somehow their competition are even cuntier.
I don't think there really are ethical car manufacturers tbh, but it's a spectrum for sure...
Tesla was the top EV seller in Europe? I'm surprised.
I'm guessing the top electric-only vehicle excluding hybrids and plug-in hybrids? In the two or three European countries I visit often you definitely see more of those, at least anecdotally. But maybe London City techbros and finance bros outweight everybody else? That seems plausible.
I have to say, I find all of these reports and investor analyses on Tesla's PR woes way too optimistic about how well they'll recover if and when Musk "steps away from the government". I really don't think that genie is going back in the bottle, guys.
Don't know about "London City techbros and finance bros" but in Sweden and Norway we prefer pure EV over hybrids.
Fair. That's the problem of reporting about Europe or even just the EU as a unit. Big place, lots of cultural differences, lots of size differences in economies and populations across those cultures.
I never really understood the deal about hybrids anyway. To me, it just seems like the worst of both worlds. One of the coolest things about EVs is that you can just charge it at home but wirth a hybrid you need to charge it in addition to also driving to the gas station to fill up the tank. The battery is also way smaller, so the electric engine doesn't take you very far anyway. And whatever engine you're using, you always have to carry the weight of the other system. And since you have both, doesn't that mean that there's way more that can break too?
And that's just talking about plug-in hybrids, the ones that generate electricity using a combustion engine just seem like ICE vehicles with extra steps.
Tesla was the top EV seller in Europe? I’m surprised.
Not only that, A few years ago, Tesla was as big as all the rest combined!
I’m guessing the top electric-only vehicle excluding hybrids and plug-in hybrids?
That's how it should be, but in most cases it's not. 100% battery is called BEV now. But BEV sales have far surpassed plugin Hybrid (PHEV).
IMO a Hybrid plugin or not is NOT electric just as it is NOT an ICE, it's a hybrid of the 2! But Hybrids are generally counted as EV.
Huh. And even with that Tesla was dominating the space? That's a shocker.
Besides telling me that every other manufacturer was massively screwing up the big thing that would seem to indicate is that penetration was extremely uneven. I came into the thread wanting to see a chart, I'm coming out of it wanting to see a map.
Tesla understood that Batteries are expensive so let's make a fancy car so customer are OK to pay for the batteries main brand either didn't have an EV or tried to make a cheap electric car, cutting down the autonomy (e.g. the Renault Zoe). Add the whole We're a progressive company, so we give Tesla rather than diesel mercedes to our executive and Tesla was the main player on the niche market for a decade.
However, as electric car stop being a Niche, every brand has now several electrical models, from a affordable urban one_ to a comfortable and fancy one, If you can afford a Mercedes, Tesla is still an option (but then there is Musk personality not helping) but if you ain't rich, you can go to Volkswagen or Renault depending on how broke you are
You're telling me a cool story about how the Tesla business model is supposed to work. My question is why I've seen a grand total of one Tesla on the road across three countries and yet somehow it was seemingly the top EV brand.
Troed's answer above going "Teslas and full electric EVs in general are popular in very specific regional pockets" goes much further towards answering that question, I think.
Hybrids are not electric vehicles. They are a thing of the past to appease the „range anxiety“ crazed people.
They maybe had a justification to exist until 6 or 7 years ago.
It was always wrong to count those as true electric vehicles.
Cool.
So, anyway.
I mean, plug-in hybrids are what they are, and in Europe in particular there's way less charging infrastructure, way more people living in apartments without the ability to set up a home charge station and way more anxiety about charging full electric EVs as a consequence, depending on the region. Hybrids are whatever, plug-in hybrids seem like a reasonable way to bridge that gap.
But I'm already entertaining this conversation way more than I want, because it's going to lead off on a tangent and I don't want to go on that tangent and we're going to end up in how public transport is the real answer and there are millions of threads here to go rehash that conversation.
So anyway.
Your point is purely anecdotal. I see lots of Teslas where I live, so there's that. I also see more BEVs than PHEVs, which is also in line with sales figures.
So, to be blunt, I think your perception is skewed or wrong.
Yet teslas stock is skyrocketing….how is this happening?!!?
Same reason Truth Social does. A bunch of idiots praying to their master.
I have always been a Toyota guy, and recently driving a Toyota corolla hybrid made me want that car.
“What a tweest!”