65 percent fewer searches
After sales of new Teslas have already suffered heavy blows in recent times, the second-hand market now also appears to be collapsing. The occasion platform AutoTrack reports that there were 65 percent fewer searches for Teslas last month, compared to the month of January this year.
According to Tim Roks, auto expert at occasion platform AutoTrack, Tesla has been doing significantly worse on the occasion market since February than in the months before. It seems that this is mainly due to the political antics of Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
“In the period from October 2024 to January of this year, there was a lot of media attention for Musk and Tesla, which more than doubled the number of searches for the electric car brand and the entry-level model – the Model 3 – on AutoTrack. In the meantime, the picture has completely reversed. The search demand for Tesla and specifically the Model 3 is 65 percent and 72 percent lower than before,” says Roks.
The fact that sales of new Teslas are doing badly was already known. For example, 6,881 new Teslas were registered in the Netherlands in the first six months of this year. The registrations have thus almost halved. In the first half of 2024, 13,396 Teslas were registered.
And Tesla is not only doing less well this year in the Netherlands. In the first half of 2025, Tesla delivered 720,803 cars worldwide. That is still quite a lot, of course, but almost 110,000 fewer than in the first half of 2024. The sharp decline therefore concerns 13.2 percent.
Less loyal to the brand
Data from research agency S&P Global Mobility, quoted by news agency Reuters, shows that many Tesla drivers in the US are no longer loyal to the brand. The loyalty of Tesla owners peaked in June 2024. At that time, 73 percent of Tesla owners invariably chose a Tesla again when purchasing a new car.
S&P analyzed car registrations in all fifty American states. From July last year, that unprecedentedly high loyalty percentage plummeted. Around that time, Musk began to openly express his support for the Trump campaign, shortly after the attack on Trump.
Last March, the loyalty percentage had fallen to 49.9 percent. Not coincidentally, Elon Musk joined DOGE around that time, the department that was created to make the government more efficient. An analyst at S&P says he had never seen an automotive brand lose so many customers in such a short period of time.
Musk plays leading role
The reduced interest in the second-hand market in the Netherlands is particularly remarkable because the asking price of a second-hand Model 3 has fallen sharply recently due to the influx of ex-lease cars. Of the 30,000 Tesla Model 3s sold from the 2019 construction year, just under 19,000 are still in the Netherlands. The rest has been exported.
According to Tim Roks of AutoTrack, Elon Musk has single-handedly caused the downward spiral in which Tesla is in: “Musk and Tesla are so closely linked that all the commotion surrounding him has damaged the image of the electric car brand. Car buyers are sensitive to that.”
Chinese competition
What car buyers are also sensitive to is price. Roks: “Tesla is no longer the only provider of electric cars. There is more choice than ever and especially the Chinese models are in many cases cheaper than the cars from Tesla.” The announced cheaper version of Tesla’s currently most popular model, the Model Y, should change that, although Roks is skeptical about this for the time being: “You then get a stripped-down version with fewer bells and whistles. Do you choose that if you can buy a more luxurious electric car from another brand for the same amount or less?”
Despite Tesla’s ‘popularity dip’ on the occasion market, the Model 3 was still in the top ten of most searched second-hand cars last month, AutoTrack reports. But in that top ten, the Model 3 fell from second to eighth place. So it seems that very little has to happen or this Tesla, once the best-selling car in the Netherlands, will fall outside the top ten.