KEY POINTS
New European car registrations of Tesla vehicles totaled 8,837 in July, down 40% year-on-year, according to the European Automobile Manufacturers Association, or ACEA.
BYD recorded 13,503 new registrations in July, up 225% annually.
Elon Musk’s automaker faces a number of challenges in Europe, including intense ongoing competition and reputational damage to the brand.
It’s because people are waiting for the new model Y. 🤣🤣🤣
Japan has generally been really underwhelming in the EV market, offering mostly Hybrids. While I hear Hyundai is cheap in USA, that is not really the case in EU, a Huyndai is as expensive as a VW. Stellantis is a crap show, they continuously offer too little too late and overcharge for it.
VW group is really killing it here in Denmark 7 out of top 10 most sold models are from VW group here, and I think in most of EU it’s mostly similar, because they offer cars with a very strong combination of range quality and attractive price.
VW has the lowest rate of errors at German mandatory biannual safety check published by TÜV, with for instance Tesla failing 7 times more often, With nearly 15% failure rate!!
In Denmark it’s even worse for Tesla with 30% of model 3 failing after 4 years!!! (first mandatory check) And Tesla even rejecting repair under warranty.
The faults aren’t minor either, they are serious faults in brakes, suspension and steering! No other brand is nearly is bad as Tesla in safety checks! The average rate is 11% so Tesla is about 3 times worse than average!!
https://fdm.dk/nyheder/nyt-om-biler/2025-01-populaer-tesla-model-dumper-med-et-brag-til-syn
Tesla’s high failure rate is primarily due to rust on the brakes from people using regen. Rust will form on all brakes if left unused, it’s just a matter of using them. There was also an issue with the front suspension that required a service bulletin at the time that was legit, but wasn’t a saftey thing.
There’s a few things that could lead to Tesla having higher rust rates over other EVs
Either way on an EV, you need to use your brakes on occasion or rust will form. Using the brakes clears the rust.
Edit: Essentially, this is a case of the facts are true, but the facts don’t always tell the whole truth. If you walk away from reading about this report thinking Tesla is the least reliable car, you’ve been mislead, unintentionally or not.
This is not true, although it is a common point of failure for Electric vehicles, it is not the primary fault, slack in the steering is.
Rust on the brakes is a very well known issue for all electric cars. Problem for Tesla is that the first security check coincide with the last service check under warranty.
Regulation regarding rust on the brake discs is very clear, and trivial to fix. So why wasn’t it fixed?
There was also a common issue with suspension.
No matter what or why a 30% failure rate is insane. The best cars (from VW) have only just above 2% failure rate!!
This is true, and has been widely publicized here in all newspapers, so mostly any owner of an electric car should know that.
But more obviously the Tesla service should absolutely have known, and fixed the issue before the mandatory safety check.
Again no other car is even close to as bad as Tesla.
It’s not something to “fix” like that.
It’s there one day and its not the next. If it’s there, you fail.
It just depends on if you’re using them or not and the weather at the time. If you take the time to go to a shop for a pre-inspection (not everyone will), and they see rust, they’ll just tell you to go use your brakes. That’s the fix.
Tesla wasn’t going to be last if not for this rust issue.
Edit: Just to be more clear - If you drive your car in the rain, park it for a few days or even overnight and check it, you’ll have rust. You don’t fix that in any way other than using them. OEMs don’t just fix that.
First that is simply wrong, did you not see the biggest point of failure is in the steering? The brakes are not what makes Tesla worst, it’s the general shitty quality and service.
Tesla wouldn’t be last if they didn’t have any faults… duh.
Tesla is so much worse than everybody else in several regards, remove the brake problem and they would still be worst. Also it’s completely irrelevant, if Tesla has this issue more than other cars it makes them worse. You might as well say they aren’t bad except for the wheels falling off all the time.
Other brands exist under the same physical laws, but don’t have as many issues as Tesla, also these issue for Tesla are not isolated to Denmark, in Germany we see a similar picture, Tesla has higher failure rate than any other brand.
Oh shit, I didn’t realize this was Denmark, i was thinking of the German one. In the German one, Tesla was only 1-2% above the next worst one which wasn’t an EV. And the reason Tesla would have more issues with rust is the reasons I listed above.
Where do you see the actual numbers/ranking the article you posted doesn’t show that, but the first thing it calls out is brakes (among all the others)
Edit this is the quote from the article
I tried to find an article with better info, but I couldn’t, the info was available a couple of months ago. Search engines just wont give me those articles.
But IMO it doesn’t really matter if it’s rust on the brakes, the brakes need to work in emergencies where regenerative braking is not enough.
You don’t get a pass for not using your brakes much in your daily driving. It’s a serious safety issue and not just some minor thing that isn’t important.
Tesla not having this under control shows that Tesla is not a good brand for safety.
It’s not a serious saftey issue at the level that would fail the car.
If you are gung ho on regen and never use/clear your brakes, you could definitely get to the point of it being legitimately dangerous, and that 100% needs to be found during an inspection and resolved, but that’s not what’s happening here in a lot of cases. This isn’t a OEM problem, it’s driver education around something entirely new problem. There are a lot of signs that something is wrong before it gets dangerous.
That’s weird statement when it clearly does, and you even claimed yourself it was the main reason for failing for Tesla.
It’s so bizarre to me that Toyota in particular isn’t a bigger player in the EV market after they were the first to get a mass market hybrid going. They were halfway there before anyone else, why’d they stumble so badly?
And I would take that bet. The reality is EVs work poorly in cold weather, we have a horrible charge infrastructure in which most of those public chargers at any given time don’t work. I’ll stick to my hybrid for the foreseeable future.
The infrastructure may be a thing, depending on where you live. I’m in Central Europe and can’t confirm that over here.
The cold climate is something I can’t confirm. If anything, I prefer my BEVs over the ICEs when it’s cold, just because I don’t have to wait for the engine to get warm until the heating works. Range is reduced during winter, true, but tbh I don’t usually have to charge over the course of a day even during winter. Still, I guess the best argument against your point is Norway. That country’s cold, but BEVs have clearly taken over the market there.
Yeah, my range goes down a bit in Winter (Northeast US) but not enough to matter. It’s situational. I definitely wouldn’t say that EVs “don’t work well” in the cold.
Thanks for the link, that was interesting
Because the Japanese government 25 years ago encouraged Japanese manufacturers to develop Hydrogen cars, that never went anywhere.
Only Nissan had an early effort on BEV with the leaf, but it was underwhelming, always the battery was too small, because they thought it was more important to keep the price down, and sell it as a secondary city car, than make an actually useful battery electric car.
For all their faults, Tesla did show the way, that it was possible to make good battery electric cars, instead of the flimsy comedic electric toy cars that were common at the time Tesla introduced the model S.
However the Hydrogen car may actually still be the future, that future is just not yet, because the price and loss of energy making hydrogen are too high, so hydrogen is not a good option until we have huge amounts of surplus energy from renewable sources that are otherwise wasted. At that point hydrogen may make a comeback as an excellent buffer to even out the difference in production to consumption of renewable energy.
But on the other hand, batteries may be so widespread at that point, that we may just use huge batteries to do the same.
In my household we have a 7.5 kWh battery that charges from our solar panels, that can last us ½ a day, easily enough to last the night over during summer. Imagine if we used a cheap used 100 kWh battery from a car instead. That would be enough to last us a whole week! At such a point the variance of renewables will be easily compensated by battery parks.
Hydrogen will however be superior for planes. Because hydrogen cells are lighter for the same energy than batteries, and the hydrogen can even be used directly in a jet engine with no harmful emissions. But we are probably still more than a decade away from that becoming main stream, although there are already examples of using it.
So all in all Toyota arrived this year with their first attractive BEV. And they will absolutely be a major player soon.
According to owners and Consumer reports, Teslas are relatively far below industry average for reliability. While everyone is encouraged by new battery longevity, the motors fail at very high rates.
Oh wow, I had completely forgotten about all the hydrogen car experiments! There was even an actual functioning hydrogen bus system for a little while in a city not too far from me
Hard disagree here.
Conversion always costs energy. There is no way around it. We’re talking about physical properties, not something that can be optimised away. With batteries, electricity is stored and released, but transfer through the existing infrastructure has been optimised to death and there are no conversions during the transport.
For fuel cells, you not only have exactly the same tech in the car (including a battery, as the fuel cell usually cannot deliver the peak power required to quickly accelerate) with the overhead of the conversion from electricity to hydrogen and back again, you also have an energy carrier that’s hard to store and transport, leading to even greater losses concerning the energy efficiency. To move exactly the same distance, a fuel cell car either needs a lot more electricity or it needs hydrogen from other sources such as methane, which suddenly turns the whole climate neutrality of those engines upside down. There’s fundamentally no way around this. So no, I really don’t think there’s an economically viable way to run fuel cell based cars.
Why try to explain something to me I already stated is the main problem?
Which is why I stated it will not be until we have huge amounts of free surplus energy to make the hydrogen from renewables .
We already have such surplus pretty frequently here, where the price of electricity goes below zero. Such periods could be used to generate hydrogen at nearly zero cost. But I guess these periods aren’t frequent and predictable enough yet. It requires enormous scale to be profitable.
But as I write, it’s all probably moot, because the conditions will arrive too late, so batteries will probably have taken over everything. But maybe in planes because of the better weight energy ratio, and maybe also in trucks to be able to have higher load capacity. And as I write instead of fuel cells, the hydrogen can be used directly in jet engines, but also in an only slightly modified ICE car.
Disregarding the problems you describe there are actually hydrogen fuel cell cars on the roads, that have been sold commercially and been available since 2021.
For instance the Toyota Mirai:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Mirai
So kind of weird to claim a product that is actually available now, isn’t possibly feasible in a future where it can have basically free fuel!
It probably boils down to which form is cheapest to create AND store, hydrogen in containers or electricity in batteries. Batteries will always be more expensive than a container, but hydrogen has way greater loss. So it’s not an obvious calculation with one solution that fit all cases.
It still won’t work.
We already need lots of hydrogen for various industrial use cases. We currently get it from methane. First thing we should do with green hydrogen is make it replace the fossil based hydrogen.
Once that’s done, we might have the abilities to expand the facilities to create more hydrogen. Those are expensive, so they won’t just run if the electricity is almost free. You don’t buy such a machine and have it idle most of the time - up hydrogen won’t ever be free, for the cost of the electrolysers alone. The tech overhead needs to be paid for. Same goes for transport.
You know what can be done with surplus electricity more easily and with the existing infrastructure? It can be put in batteries.
It won’t be because hydrogen’s late but because batteries are - in cars - the less complex, more reliable and cheaper solution.
It makes sense for planes, I never argued against that. Especially because the weight is reduced while you use the fuel you’re carrying. I don’t see it for trucks simply because the infrastructure for battery electric trucks is already everywhere, but yeah, charging several hundred kWh takes time and such large batteries have a price tag attached to them - but that’s not what we were talking about, no?
I’m well aware of hydrogen cars existing. Hydrogen based cars have been around for so long that most of them got discontinued quite some time ago, such as the Mercedes GLC F-Cell. It’s not that I say that you can’t build them, I just say that there’s no economically viable use case for them. There won’t be free fuel for them because hydrogen will remain rare as manufacturing and transporting it will remain difficult. Fuel cells and tanks that withstand 400 to 800 bar pressure aren’t free either - and neither is the whole infrastructure to distribute it, which goes way beyond the transport as a fuel cell gas station is a much larger hassle to set up than hooking up a charging station to an existing energy grid. The point remains that even if electricity gets to be free at times, it’s much more efficient to just store it in batteries than to translate it to hydrogen, ship that around the country or to another continent, store that in a cryo tank for days or weeks and then translate it back to electricity to then be stored in the battery your fuel cell based car still needs to operate (albeit smaller than those in BEVs, granted). It just doesn’t make sense to assume that hydrogen, with the given overhead attached, will ever be free. Even electricity often isn’t when it seems to be (e.g. I might see a price of -2 cents at night but the bill then includes a 12 cents “network fee” per kWh), so it surely won’t be the case for hydrogen either. And then, with all the overhead attached, you still need several times the energy to move the car the same distance as a battery electric car which makes it even less of an economical use case, assuming there’s always a price attached to the energy you need (which there is - even for my own photovoltaic setup, I usually calculate about 6 cents per kWh to account for the depreciation of the modules).
So yes, it’s an obvious calculation. Batteries aren’t free, I get that, but neither are fuel cells, containers and smaller batteries. Just as with ICEs, the running costs will be the defining aspect of the TCO of a car and there’s just no way for hydrogen to ever meet the price of putting electricity in a battery because a fuel cell car does that, too, plus all the conversions. Its operation is literally a superset of a BEV, so the running costs will be higher, unless you use fossil hydrogen, which i hope nobody ever seriously suggests as a large scale solution to de-carbonify traffic.
OK you make a lot of good points here that I absolutely agree with.
The only difference is in the final conclusion, and I admit you may be right.
Notice I never claimed fuel cells is the future, only that they might make a comeback.
But I agree that your points show that the chance of that is slimmer than I thought.
No one stumbled at Toyota. They sell more hybrids than all the EVs combined. Toyota makes money. Most companies lost money on EVs.
Two things I think. They gambled on fuel cells because it offers an easier solution at a time when charging stations were rare. It’s Tesla becoming popular very quickly followed by VW going all out on EV that really caught them on the backfoot. The second thing is that they underestimated the level of change to battery technology. They (at the time correctly) stated that for every 10 EV’s, they could make 90 hybrids. While that is still valid, the battery technology has evolved significantly and become cheaper in the process. Even 2 years ago you couldn’t find an EV in Europe for under 30k €, now there are several cars to choose from and not only Chinese cars either.
All true, but North America does not have mandated safety inspections for cars. They are used until they fall apart and kill people.
VW has been getting some flak for being more expensive to maintain than for instance Tesla, but clearly it makes a difference, VW is doing better in checks than Toyota, that many Americans consider the most reliable car brand.
It depends, some states in the USA do have safety inspections, but most don’t. I can’t speak for any of the other north American countries though.
The Kia EV3 and Picanto are pretty popular in the Netherlands nowadays, which are basically just a Hyundai in disguise.
The KIA EV3 was very well received by the press here, and won car of the year first price with Skoda Elroq as #2.
But in sales the Skoda Elroq beat the KIA EV3 with the Elroq as #1 and the EV3 as #3.
KIA Picanto is a model that has been reasonably popular here, is that available as BEV now?
Here BEV clearly dominate the market. I think all of top 10 cars sold are BEV.
https://mobility.dk/nyheder/juli-boed-paa-markant-fremgang-i-bilsalget-elbiler-fortsat-i-front-men-usikkerhed-om-bilpriser-venter/
I think I wrote 7 of top 10 were VW group, turns out it was actually 8 out of 10.
With KIA EV3 and Renault R5 being the only 2 that are not from VW group. And the VW T-Roc and Cupra Leon as the only non BEV.
Also note that despite BEV is absolutely dominant, Tesla is completely out of top 10 now.
If you don’t have a translator in your browser, I can copy paste a translation of the article for you.
Just for fun, you might try to “decode” the Danish text, and be surprised how much you can understand. I sometimes do that with Dutch, and knowing English and German and having Danish as a native language, I can understand about 80% 😋 , but it’s slow as hell.