In October, fully electric cars took 37 percent of the new-car market: 94,086 of them, more than petrol and diesel cars combined for the second month in a row. Less than three years after the old subsidy was scrapped overnight and sales collapsed, the birthplace of the automobile is buying electric faster than its own car industry predicted!
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Germany’s best-selling electric car in October was Tesla’s Model Y as it outsold the Volkswagen Golf, Germany’s best-selling car every year since 1981.
The catch is Tesla’s rhythm. Its German registrations swing with the delivery quarter, so the Model Y went from 299 in July to 8,038 in September, and the Tesla brand as a whole registered just 2,932 cars in October.
Over the full year sits second, outsold by Czech automobile manufacturer Skoda’s Elroq that registered more than 3,000 cars in every month of 2026 through September and leads the year to date with 30,845, ahead of the Model Y.
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The top-10 brands in Germany according to the latest registration come exclusively from domestic brands: Volkswagen, Mercedes, and BMW.
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To be honest, I wasn’t expecting such a nuanced answer. Thanks for that! It’s much easier to just spout an opinion than to actually look up some facts.
When it comes to electric vehicles, I just get worked up really quickly because I keep hearing these statements that discourage others from trying it out for themselves. I especially wanted to set the record straight on these exaggerated claims:
Of course there is room for improvement but nowadays it’s just not as bad as stated there.
You really do seem to be a power user, and I recognise that your experiences have been different from mine. It just surprises me that you seem to run into difficulties so often. It might be because I don’t see it as a big deal if, on very rare occasions, I have to switch to a charging point right next to it if the first one doesn’t work straight away. As long as I don’t have to drive to a completely different location, it’s no problem for me.
Regarding your satisfaction report: I couldn’t find the exact questions that were asked. Therefore, I can’t tell whether there were serious technical issues or if people simply said there could be more options for buying coffee nearby. (Actually, I can’t explain to myself why more businesses haven’t set up shop near charging points.)
I’m an electrical engineer and I don’t have any tolerance for needing to climb up on a charging point at -10⁰C weather in the middle of the Black Forest to remove snow, so that the antenna of the thing can contact its mothership, to generously allow me to pay for their 0,53€/kWh juice to my nearly stranded car with 0% charge, and nobody around in a 5km radius at 4am.
My issue is not that it doesn’t work every 8th or 10th charge. My issue is the aforementioned enshittification: that these things are totally preventable by better engineering, e.g. running cables from to the Telekom box in 100m distance, by using multiple modems and LoRA, by directly reporting faulty chargers to common backends, by standardising payment APIs, …
Imagine a world where your route planner automatically includes charging stops for the most efficient use of your time with the most efficient uses of your subscriptions. Imagine autocharge when you plug in your car and it automatically selects the best charging tariff. Imagine a cap on energy prices so that you’re not surprised by 0,80€ when you expected 0,40€. The technology is there! We could have that! But I’m pretty sure there will be an https://xkcd.com/927 situation for the next 20 years until some politician steps in and regulates this.
Idk. It’s exaggerated but I generally agree with the sentiment. Let me try to fix it:
Third party chargers are partly enshittyfied in Germany, with high prices, a few dozen different providers, every other one coercing you to use their shitty app, often with slow charging and unreliable service.
That sounds much better to me. The other version just sounded like fear-mongering by the diesel lobby.