Tesla sales continue to plummet across Europe under increasing pressure from the arrival of Chinese brands.
Sales collapsed by 40 per cent in July across Europe, the UK and Scandinavia to 8,800, despite the American company run by billionaire Elon Musk relaunching the popular Model Y and the ramping up of production at its Berlin gigafactory.
For the first seven months of 2025, Tesla sales are now down by a third, with 60,000 fewer vehicles being delivered at 119,000.
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In the UK, Tesla sales fell nearly 60 per cent in July to fewer than 1,000 and are down 7 per cent in the year to date at 23,700.
The decline of Tesla bucks the trend of an accelerating take-up in the sales of electric cars across the continent. Monthly data from the ACEA, the European automotive association, indicates that Tesla is losing out to Chinese manufacturers who are not just selling electric cars but more affordable hybrids too.
Across the continent, BYD more than tripled sales in July to 13,500, while SAIC, the Shanghai company that owns the MG brand, outperformed the market with a 13 per cent increase to 23,300.
So far this year, BYD has increased sales by 63,000 units to 84,000 and SAIC has added 37,000 sales to 176,000.
Sales of zero-emission cars are increasing, but as the ACEA said: “The battery-electric car market share for the year to date is still far from where it needs to be at this point in the transition.”
Across all European countries, electric car sales rose 33 per cent in July and are up nearly 26 per cent in the year to date at 1.37 million. However, that represents just 17.4 per cent of the 7.9 million-strong total market.
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Strip away the all-but-transitioned early-adopting Norwegian market, where 94 per cent of its 85,000 sales in the year to date were electric, and the comparatively strong UK market, where electric car sales have reached more than 21 per cent, and the European Union’s take-up of electric car is 15.5 per cent.
The UK is the second-largest market for electric cars at 254,000 in the first seven months, behind Germany’s 297,000, but pulling away from France where the electric market has gone into reverse at 167,000.
As a proportion of all sales, the UK’s electric performance is better than Germany and France, both at less than 18 per cent, but trails other countries with sizeable overall markets like the Netherlands and Belgium, where electric sales are running at about a third.
