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Tesla has agreed to buy assets of embattled German engineering group Manz as the US electric vehicle maker expands its footprint in the European market despite plummeting sales in the region.
Under the deal, Tesla Automation, the group’s automation technology arm, will take over more than 300 employees, plant and equipment at Manz’s site in Reutlingen after the German group entered insolvency proceedings following a sharp deterioration in Europe’s battery market. The companies did not disclose terms of the transaction.
The purchase comes as Tesla faces a sharp sales decline in Europe and as its billionaire chief Elon Musk has stepped up his high-profile interventions in the region’s politics.
The electric-vehicle maker sold just 9,900 units in Europe last month, a decline of more than 45 per cent from the same period in 2024, according to data from the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association. Its overall share of new car registrations fell to 1 per cent from 1.8 per cent over the same period.
Registrations of new Tesla vehicles in Germany, which hosts Tesla’s only manufacturing plant in Europe, plunged 59.5 per cent from a year earlier in January.
Tesla’s shrinking market share follows Musk’s unprecedented foray into EU politics, where he backed the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) ahead of the country’s elections on Sunday, sparking a backlash on the continent. Musk has also railed against the EU, which he described in November as “undemocratic”.
Alice Weidel, the co-leader of the AfD, said on Monday that Musk had personally congratulated her as the party doubled its vote to its highest share of about 21 per cent.
Automotive analysts have said that another factor behind Tesla’s sales drop could be that consumers were waiting for the upgraded Y model, scheduled for the first half of 2025.
Matthias Schmidt, a car analyst, said Tesla sales also faced a tough comparison with those in January last year, when numbers were boosted by a revamp of the carmaker’s Model 3.
He added: “There’s no getting past the fact though that the January numbers are incredibly disappointing and could start to suggest a migration away from the brand to alternatives to Tesla.”
In France, Tesla sales were down 63 per cent, while registrations of Tesla cars in Norway fell 38 per cent. In the UK, registrations declined 8 per cent from a year earlier.
The fall came even as European consumers purchased 166,000 battery EVs for the month, up 37 per cent from a year ago. Pure EV sales grew faster than those of all other types of vehicles, while sales of cars with petrol and diesel engines fell 20.5 per cent and 26.5 per cent, respectively.
The figures cover the EU, UK and other markets including Norway, one of Europe’s biggest markets for EVs.
European sales by SAIC Motor, the Chinese state-backed carmaker that has expanded into the EU and partnered with Audi in China, rose 37 per cent to 23,000 vehicles in January, among the largest year-on-year increases in sales of any big manufacturer in the region.
Overall new vehicle registrations on the continent fell 2.1 per cent in January to 995,271.
