Tesla Plans On Beating Toyota In Germany
Tesla has high hopes for its new factory in Germany. Will Giga Berlin be enough for the EV maker to take on auto giants like Toyota in Europe?
With the EV market secured deep in its pocket,
Tesla
is turning its focus on legacy automakers as well. Here in the U.S., Elon Musk & Co. have a long way to go before they catch up to the likes of Ford and General Motors, but the tides toward EV adoption are turning faster in Europe.In Germany specifically, Tesla has set its goals high. Thanks in part to its
new factory
in Berlin, the EV dominator hopes to double sales in the country every year, a feat that would have it outperforming auto-giant importer Toyota by the end of 2022.Has the Austin-based electric car maker set the bar too high? Or is it already on the road toward outpacing the largest car company in the world in Europe’s most populous nation?
Jerry
, your car insurance super app, took a closer look to find out.Tesla doing well in Germany, but not that well
Germany doesn’t import a lot of vehicles. Volkswagen (VW) is by far the
most popular car brand
in the country, selling more than double the units of the second-place maker, the also-German Mercedes-Benz. In fact, six of the top ten car brands are German-owned.Tesla is (wisely) not hoping to overtake these automakers in the country. Instead, it’s eying importers like Toyota. But even that might be out of its reach for 2022.
Despite being well ahead of the U.S. in EV adoption,
Inside EVs
says economic pressures in German brought on by the war in Ukraine
have stalled the country’s auto industry. So while the Tesla Model Y might be the best-selling vehicle in the country, it’s the largest piece of an ever-shrinking pie. And while Tesla’s 2022 sales have so far improved by almost 40% from the previous year, that won’t be enough to reach its 80,000-unit target.
Dominating Toyota in Germany is out of reach for Tesla in 2022
Many of Tesla’s troubles in Germany this year are industry-wide, which begs the question: could it outpace Toyota this year anyway? After looking at the data, the answer is: not likely.
While the EV maker managed to sell over 18,200 units in the country in the first half of 2022, Toyota kept its pace up to 2021 standards, selling over 37,800 cars to Germans in the same period, as per
Best-Selling-Cars
. Tesla plans to ramp up production at the Berlin plant, with the goal to make 5,000 Model Ys a week by the first quarter of 2023. But those EVs will be delivered all over the continent, not just to German drivers, so they won’t necessarily bridge the sales gap between Tesla and Toyota.
Germany’s affinity for domestically made luxury vehicles might help Tesla speed up sales in the second half of 2022, but doubling its 2021 numbers in the country looks to be out of reach.
How is Tesla doing at home?
Back in the U.S., Tesla has been in the news for all the wrong reasons in 2022. Accusations of racial abuse and sexual harassment at its workplaces have triggered a number of embarrassing headlines and lawsuits.
It doesn’t seem to be slowing down sales, though. Tesla already sold over 282,000 EVs to Americans in 2022, setting the company up to easily eclipse 2021’s 302,000-unit total.
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