When that word is used dishonestly for everyone you don’t agree with it loses all meaning.

Having sold all the ones possible to affluent Greens, it's how you sell the remainder to affluent conservatives.

Tesla's sales last quarter were the result of the US ending subsidies, so record sales and decreases outside of the US aren't mutually exclusive facts.

> basis for an SEC investigation

That is funny. Of all the things Tesla should be under investigation their sales in Germany won't make top-100 list.

Tesla can say anything as being "commercial puffery".

Is that because they have fewer model numbers? If you look at fleet sales, does that placement still hold? Something like Toyota might have dozens of different similar products, diluting their rank ordering.

This is largely a function of their brand positioning. There are about 20 models of car under about 6 brands on the VW MEB platform, all, well, very similar (except the weird microbus thing). Tesla has instead chosen to go for two models under one brand.

Both are _valid_ approaches, and you see both from other companies (eg GM leans into the many brands thing fairly heavily, BMW is single brand few models), but it does make claims of "this is the best selling vehicle" rather uninteresting.

Volkswagen sells more EVs than Tesla in Europe:

https://eu-evs.com/marketShare/ALL/Groups/Line/All-time-by-Q...

Volkswagen's sales are split across many brands (VW, Audi, Skoda, Porsche, Cupra, MAN, Scania, etc.) and models.

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Possibly because unfortunately, about 20% of German voters voted for the AfD in the last federal election, which likes to put some Nazi-sounding stuff on its campaign posters ("Kinder statt Inder," for example).

However, your analysis still kind of stands, as the AfD and even more extreme parties (like "Wahre Alternativ") tend to do better in the worse-off parts of the country like the hollowed-out districts on the eastern border (such as the one my brother-in-law left pretty much the moment his accounting degree hit his hand) where people were not big Tesla buyers, and poorly in affluent, well-educated places like Munich and Freiburg, where the kind of people who had been buying Teslas live (and are now buying just about any other EV).