How difficult life has become for earnest, liberal-minded motorists who like to show off their environmental credentials through their choice of car. Until recently, they were buying Teslas by the car park-load. But now they seem suddenly to have gone off them.
European Tesla sales have plummeted since Donald Trump’s election victory brought Elon Musk into government as axeman-in-chief. Nowhere has the plunge been more precipitous than in Germany, where sales fell 60 per cent in January and a further 76 per cent in February – when just 1,429 Teslas were sold. Existing Tesla owners, too, appear to be dumping their vehicles prematurely. In Britain, the prices of a one-year-old Tesla are reported to be 21 per cent lower than at the same time last year (that’s the price of a 2024 model Tesla in 2025 compared with the price of a 2023 model in 2024).
You might want to save the planet, but then you can hardly demean yourself by associating with a man who has expressed support for the AfD and gave what looked to many people like a Nazi salute. Trouble is, for liberal-minded motorists – especially German ones – to dump a car on the grounds of connections with the far right is just a tad hypocritical. If you don’t like the idea of giving your custom to a car company set up by a man who gave something like a Nazi salute, then why on Earth are you still buying Volkswagens – and expecting the rest of the world to do so?
The guy who started that company didn’t exactly hold back on his Nazi salutes. Volkswagen wasn’t just a product of Nazi Germany; the Führer himself was deeply involved in the project. The whole idea of a ‘people’s car’, which would transport two adults and three children at up to 62 mph, was devised by Adolf Hitler. Elements of the design of the VW Beetle, not least its air-cooled engine, were born of his instructions to its main designer, Ferdinand Porsche. The car was originally called the KdF-Wagen, from ‘Kraft durch Freude’, or ‘Strength through Joy’ – an openly Nazi slogan.
No one is accusing the current management of Volkswagen of far-right sympathies, and no model now on sale owes anything to Adolf Hitler, but that rather misses the point. Volkswagen would not exist today were it not for post-war motorists in Europe and America being prepared to put aside the car’s Nazi associations and recognise that actually it was a rather good car. They had every reason to feel disgust at the idea of driving a car part-designed by Adolf Hitler, but they didn’t. They based their choice of car purely on the engineering and aesthetic merits of the vehicle. This wasn’t just conservative-minded motorists – the Beetle went on to become a favourite of the flower power generation.
If consumers carry on this way, they are going to deprive themselves of choice and make themselves poorer
That is what makes today’s situation different. We are constantly implored to base our purchasing decisions on matters that have nothing to do with price, practicality or other qualities of the product itself – but rather on the political views of people who run the company. As I wrote here last week, a similar thing is going on with the bakers Gail’s, which is opposed by some because its chairman, Luke Johnson, was a prominent Brexit campaigner.
This attitude – don’t focus on the product but on the people who make it – is also feeding protectionism. We are constantly urged to boycott products on the basis of the country from which they are derived. Tesla, indeed, had already come under fire in Germany before Musk started his political flip to the right – its factory near Berlin was opposed by many, notionally on the grounds that it would destroy a few trees, but more realistically on the grounds that it was an American car, not a German one. This happens on the right as well as the left: against Chinese phones on the one hand, Israeli oranges on the other.
If consumers carry on this way, they are going to deprive themselves of choice and make themselves poorer. It is an attitude of the nationalist, protectionist 1930s rather than the post-war era when consumers became more open to buying foreign-made goods and started to look to the quality of what they were buying, not who made it.
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