For a long time, Tesla was the top dog in electric cars. Now rivals are entering the market and competition is intensifying. This has an impact on prices.
Munich/Austin – The electric car pioneer Tesla has also significantly reduced prices in Europe and the USA in view of the tougher competition. The entry-level variant of the compact SUV Model Y now costs 9,100 euros less than before at 44,890 euros, as Tesla announced.
With the Model 3, the starting price fell by 6,000 to 43,990 euros. Tesla had already reduced prices in the USA the day before. This gives US buyers a chance at tax breaks, which can boost sales.
In China, the group recently had to offer its cars cheaper due to sales problems. For the Model 3 and the Model Y, the Americans in the People’s Republic are asking for more than ten percent less than recently. This was the second price reduction after the fall of last year. In China, Tesla is having to fend off increasingly strong domestic competition from suppliers such as BYD, Xpeng and Nio. Before the turn of the year, Mercedes-Benz also had to reduce prices in China for its EQS luxury car – the all-electric version of the flagship S-Class – and for the electric EQE model. Tesla has also reduced prices in Japan.
In the past quarter, Tesla had increased global deliveries by almost a third to around 405,000 vehicles, but this fell short of the expectations of experts, who had expected around 421,000. Tesla long dominated the electric vehicle market, selling cars as fast as they could be built. In the meantime, the supply of the rivals is increasing – and inflation and rising raw material costs had previously caused price increases in the year.
Losses became apparent on Friday for the recently stabilized Tesla shares. In pre-market US trading, they temporarily fell by a good five percent to the $117 mark. Shares fell as low as nearly $101 in China’s price cut a week ago, but then bounced back on a broad recovery in tech stocks.
Last year, the paper lost two-thirds of its value, partly because Tesla boss Elon Musk threw shares worth billions on the market for the takeover of the short message service Twitter. At the beginning of this year, the surprisingly weaker delivery figures weighed on the price.
Tesla is still valued at around $390 billion – significantly more than Volkswagen ($81.6 billion), Mercedes ($79.8 billion) and BMW ($66.3 billion) combined. dpa
