Europe's EV sales surge 26% in 2025 while Tesla faces decline

US made cars had the reputation of being low quality, too big, too heavy and too inefficient for european cities.

Tesla was somewhat different. People bought Teslas not for their promised "self driving" capabilities (I know no Tesla driver that took those promises at face value or got the FSD option FWIW), but one motivation was to "stick it" to snobbish arrogant european manufacturers wanting to develop "clean" ICEs with "green fuels" or other non-sensical crimes against thermodynamics like H2-cars.

Now, Tesla (and the US in general) has a brand toxicity problem, and it is worsening. People I know that would consider a Tesla some years ago now drive electric VWs or BWMs or KIAs, often times much more expensive cars than the comparable Tesla 3 / Y model.

This trend will probably continue the next years, and I don't see a way for Tesla to repair the brand image.

For what it's worth, Tesla is by a gigantic margin the lowest quality-for-dollar American vehicle you can buy. The EV thing was unique until it wasn't.

All the manufacturers are closer together in pretty much every attribute than car-illiterate internet fanboys and haters make it out to be.

Tesla killed its brand reputation thrice.

- First they went "camera only", alienating people who knows the tech.

- Then they mocked car industry for so long. It was a necessary poke at first, but they didn't get prepared, and the elephant proved that it can run.

- Then Elon's Trump affair and all the shebang happened.

The broken FSD promises, using non-auto rated parts (and related failures), being negligent of their own errors and acting like they are deaf to the criticism is the cement between the layers.

I think it's more like that before only Tesla had working lane following system on highways that allowed one to do mostly hands-free driving during long drives but nowadays even the cheapest KIA has it working well so no need to spend extra money on Tesla. I know working-class EU folks driving Teslas who couldn't care less about any perceived toxicity of the brand typical for German green party voting snobs.

> US made cars had the reputation of being low quality, too big, too heavy and too inefficient for european cities. Tesla was somewhat different.

How so? Tesla doesn't produce a compact car by any european standard. Their smallest car, the Model 3, is the same size of a VW Caddy, an utilitary/7s seat Family VAN, bigger than a more refined VW Touran, another 7 seater family van or the popular VW Tiguan, a large (by euro standards) SUV.

[citation needed]

You don't need to be car literate to know that a $90,000 Tesla interior feels on par with a bottom of the line Nissan Sentra. I'm not sure you can even buy another American-made car that feels so cheap? Curious if people have an idea of what American make/model feels worse to sit in.

They had camera-only tech employing multiple 4k cameras running at over 2000fps. Not your grandma's 480p/25fps webcam many car manufacturers use as parking cameras. 2000fps gives you enormous safety margin even in case of individual frame misdetection. The long-tail issues they hit are present on LiDAR vehicles as well but LiDAR is much slower, more difficult to process and sensor fusion adds its own errors.

2000 FPS is impressive.

Not detecting overturned semis, road debris, and swerving to road dividers is even more impressive with that tech.

Where a relatively simple radar can prevent without running a slow-motion camera rig and a wannabe supercomputing cluster on the car.

To be frank, I'm not against 2000 FPS cameras, but I can't come into terms with not adding a simple radar to detect something unknown is dangerously close and the land missile needs to stop.

Assuming of course that the relevant computer vision components can run at 2000 fps as well.. I highly doubt it.

Running at 2000FPS in low light (and getting meaningful data at that sensor size) is also impossible to begin with. Even if you can do constant 60, you're in good shape.

2000 can be good for doing multiexposure and maybe detecting fine movement, but assuming that everything running 2000FPS (and processing 16000 frames/sec) is not a simple thing, esp, if you're running in an uncontrolled and chaotic environment.

Why 2k FPS? I'm not being facetious; human eye sees, apparently, at around 25fps, which is why this is what TVs and cinemas used to use. At that rate, and 144kph, say, the car moves 1.4m between frames.

Fine, so maybe you think this is too much. But 10x this still gives you 14cm between frames, at what is already speeding in most jurisdictions I know of.

2000 FPS seems to my untrained eye like a problem, not a feature.

This is completely false. Tesla commanded a premium when it was the only long range EV in time, despite its crappy build quality.

Now everyone else has catched with equal drive trains but better build quality.

Go sit in a $90,000 Tesla then go sit in a $90,000 literally-anything-else.

That price range for Ford and Chevy trucks or SUVs for example are outrageously luxurious by comparison (not even considering their additional utility).

as expected too heavy of a data stream to be true. resolution is lower than 4K while frame rates aren’t even in the ballpark of 2000 fps.

https://www.blogordie.com/2023/09/hw4-tesla-new-self-driving...

Tesla Model 3 is typical middle class sedan size IMHO, like VW Passat, Audi A4, BWM 3, i.e. one size up from VW Golf/Tiguan/Touran.

Tesla was different because it was no gas-guzzling V8 behemoth that takes at least 20l/100km like what you used to associate with "US cars".

I have this first-hand from the FSD team at Tesla from 5 years ago. Who knows where they are nowadays. You can believe whatever you like.

Because you are processing a sequence of a fixed length in deep learning models and the more frames you have, the more accurate your FSD output is. Driving 1.4m between the frames with single-frame accuracy of 80% is quite risky and input correction quite discrete; 14cm is still risky for a proper trajectory planning. Now make it in millimeters and suddenly your trajectory is nearly perfect with only little noise.

Individual owners may care about brand toxicity or may not, but it affects how much tesla can charge for new vehicles and resale value of used ones. Of course this analysis is just MHO, maybe the real cause why EV market is expanding and Tesla is stagnating is something completely different, like missing "android auto" resp. apple equivalent thing functionality.

That would be something like 371Gbps (some assumptions) raw data to process, per camera. I would assume a lot of shortcuts to get that down, but still an unreasonably huge scope to process in "real time" in a car.

> typical middle class sedan size IMHO, like VW Passat, Audi A4, BWM 3, i.e. one size up from VW Golf/Tiguan/Touran.

Which have inflated one size/class bigger than they used to 25 years ago.

The people who now drive these kind of cars today used to drive A6, BMW 5 series and E-Class Mercedes Benz. Cars lass/segments have slided both in size and luxury over a few decades.

If you look at car sales number you will see that the cars that sell the most are in the small and compact segment categories. Here is the top10 in Q1 in Europe:

Rank Model Units Sold Manufacturer Segment

1 Dacia Sandero 42,913 Renault Group Supermini

2 Citroën C3 34,064 Stellantis Subcompact

3 Peugeot 208 33,821 Stellantis Supermini

4 Volkswagen Golf 33,663 Volkswagen Group Compact

5 Renault Clio 31,754 Renault Group Supermini

6 Dacia Duster 31,217 Renault Group Compact SUV

7 Volkswagen T-Roc 30,949 Volkswagen Group Crossover

8 Volkswagen Tiguan 29,733 Volkswagen Group SUV

9 Toyota Yaris Cross 29,226 Toyota Motor Europe Crossover SUV

10 Peugeot 2008 28,072 Stellantis Subcompact SUV

Tesla‘s “vision only” with phantom braking suicide experiments reached court last year in Germany and for the first time the court proved they exist for real and the cars are dangerous. This will be interesting to watch. I tried often free autopilot in model Y and it hits hard the brakes on empty road every other time. Afterwards I stopped using it completely. The car is nice, but without working assistance systems. Lane keeping also does not work reliably. Model Y is nice electric car for people without much requirements like me - it’s spacious and electric range is acceptable.

About the process in court in German: https://teslaanwalt.de/autopilot-als-sicherheitsrisiko/

> human eye sees, apparently, at around 25fps

What do you mean by "sees"? I'll bet you that you can't walk around wearing a VR headset running at 25 FPS for more than 30 seconds without violently emptying your stomach. Trying to watch a movie on a display that doesn't exhibit motion blur also makes me motion sick.

Human brain doesn't see in terms of frames at all. There's a limit where an increase in FPS likely becomes imperceptible to most people but that limit is at least 10 times higher (from personal experience), likely more.

> but one motivation was to "stick it" to snobbish arrogant european manufacturers wanting to develop "clean" ICEs with "green fuels" or other non-sensical crimes against thermodynamics like H2-cars

Eh? Most European manufacturers (maybe not Stellantis) had at least one BEV by the time any Tesla was available in Europe. I'm not sure any European manufacturer has ever released a production hydrogen car? That's mostly Toyota.

I was about to comment the same, 2k FPS means a maximum shutter speed of 1/2000, you need a lot of light to capture an image this quickly, in low light conditions it's simply impossible to capture enough light even if using very high end optics and sensors.

You're making my point for me.

Nobody cared that the build quality is "a little worse" all around because it doesn't meaningfully affect the vehicle's fitness for purpose like the internet comment sections will pretend it does.

As long as the vehicles were meaningfully different in other ways, those other ways were the dominating variables in the equation that make/break the purchase decision. Only when all else is within spitting distance of equal do Nth order variables like "muh door feel" and upholstery texture and speculative comments about reliability long after it's projected to replaced (gotta throw that one in there for the Toyota fanboys) start mattering....because they don't actually result in a seriously different ownership experience for the average user and the average user knows this.

Modern ICEVs are super clean [1]. Teslas were bought because of their software advantage and I don't mean "self driving" I argue that Tesla in its core is a software company, the old brands quickly caught up on the software part, that is why you are going to see a shift from the Tesla market. Yes sure there is going to be some political factor but I don't think the % is that high, compared to better/improved software more slick UI and overall better build quality.

I see quite the opposite trend tho.

Hybrids are great this is where the push should have been. Dacia is doing really great in Europe. The old manufactures are again not in the loop. Dacia rebranding is quite something[2] their new Duster/Bigster line looks super cool and modern. The market is already starting to slowly shift less digital more analogue[3]. The whole TV screen cockpit, piano black plastic, AI everywhere is monstrosity its atrocious this is not luxury its grotesque.

[1] - A negative emission internal combustion engine vehicle? - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S135223102... [2] - 2024 All-New Dacia Duster: Reveal Video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QtOa7cP6MQ [3] - Hypercar Boss Chat! Fixing Jaguar, Horsepower Wars & More… | 4K - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6lAhRqHmuw&t=329s

You actually said the opposite of that.

What you originally said is that there is little variance along any dimension.

What you're saying now is there is variance along different dimensions and different people care about different dimensions.

This is also what the original comment that you replied to said: build quality is bad (Dimension A), people were willing to accept it due to being an EV (Dimension B).

I agree that a small / compact car is missing in the Tesla line-up and that also hurts their european performance (and will continue to hurt).

I don't know the specifics, maybe they are timing individual cameras in a way they achieve 2000fps with a crisp image in each camera and merging them together. Or maybe they are using some MIT tech that was able to capture super low light conditions.

IIRC there were BMW i3, Nissan Leaf (2010) and later Renault Zoe.

BMW in cooperation with Toyota has/had H2 cars (currently iX5), but it is some sort of pilot phase.

Tesla with their model 3 and supercharger network demonstrated that electric vehicles indeed are viable, and that got the ball rolling.

Being able to capture in super low light conditions is dependent on two things. 1. Your sensor's noise floor, 2. The number of photons you can get per unit time.

First one is dependent on the manufacturing process, and the second one is dependent on your sensor size.

Currently, the leading sensor manufacturers (namely Sony Semiconductor and Canon) are doing very low noise sensors. However, to get both these low noise levels and convincing images needs full frame sensors, at least. APS-C can somewhat close, but it can't be there (because physics).

Even in that case, you can't do 2000FPS and get meaningful images from every one of them.

There's no way that a Tesla car cam sports full frame or APS-C sensors.

So, it's physics.

AFAIK Sony and Canon are still using some ancient manufacturing process for sensors as chips have the priority and if Tesla has access to e.g. 5nm process for manufacturing sensors that would drastically expand possibilities. Also you bypassed the possibility of timing multiple sensors separately to achieve 2000fps.

There's no way the FSD team overstated its capabilities, right?

The reason sensor manufacturers use "seemingly ancient" (i.e. huge feature sizes) processes in their sensors is you really don't need a more advanced process like in processors.

When you manufacture something which computes, power consumption and internal noise improvement is more drastic with improved manufacturing processes. When you are measuring something, you don't need or want too small pixels or features to begin with.

So having a small gigapixel sensor just because your process allows creates more disadvantage over having a sensor same size with a lower resolution, from light capturing angle. So, low-light sensitivity and resolution is a trade-off.

Back-illuminated sensors used by all contemporary cameras created this leap rather than reducing feature size via improved processes. You already pack the sensor as dense as possible (you don't want gaps or "smaller" pixels w/o increasing resolution either), and moving data/power plane away from pixels is the biggest contributor to noise in the sensor.

See the link [0]. Top left image is full frame, top right is APS-C, bottom left is M4/3, and bottom right is full frame / high-res (60+MP) sensors.

When you look at the images, smaller the sensor, worse the noise performance. When you compare full-size images of top left to bottom right, top left image is better in terms of noise. I selected RAW to surface "what sensor sees" The selected spot is the darkest point in that scene.

You can select JPEG to see what in camera image processing does to these images. Shutter speed is around 1/40s and ISO is fixed at 12800 since it's the de-facto standard for night photography.

> Also you bypassed the possibility of timing multiple sensors separately to achieve 2000fps.

Working on an image which doesn't reflect real world is a bit dangerous, isn't it?

[0]: https://www.dpreview.com/reviews/image-comparison?attr18=low...

Or, just maybe, you are completely wrong and misheard or were lied to.

You don't need to give me lessons in photography. I remember around the time of D750 Sony upgraded their sensor manufacturing process from some ancient 100-200nm or so to something newer which improved night performance tenfold. Quantum efficiency got substantially better on a better process. Nobody is telling you to shrink pixels to get 1000MPx, instead about making a better 30MPx sensor of the same size. Yet they aren't using the latest (2-5nm) processes for sensors as at their sizes that would be too expensive (I guess H100 chip-level prices for a medium-format sensor).

Everything is possible. They also might have used some creative metrics giving 2000+ fps. I don't know. Or they might have found some neat trick nobody thought about before.

There was also the VW eGolf/eUp, and the pre-Zoe Renault (which IIRC was a bit of a disaster). The first Tesla didn't become available in Europe til after the Zoe came out.

EDIT: Actually, looks like the eGolf was a few months after the Tesla Model S.

> The long-tail issues they hit are present on LiDAR vehicles as well but LiDAR is much slower, more difficult to process and sensor fusion adds its own errors.

The long tail is long no matter what. Which is why the most robust solutions deploy sensors with orthogonal sensing modalities that can compliment one another. By relying on only one sensor type, Tesla has made it hard for their system overly brittle, which has resulted in avoidable deaths and destruction.

> LiDAR is much slower, more difficult to process

LiDAR in my experience is much easier to process, as the sensor stream is just an array of distances. Camera in my experience is much harder to process, as the sensor stream is an array of RGB values from which you have to infer distances. So by what metric are you alleging LiDAR is more difficult to process?

> sensor fusion adds its own errors.

You'll have to do a degree of sensor fusion across all the camera sensors anyway, so going camera-only don't absolve you of having to fuse sensor streams and come up with a belief. Sensor fusion in general tends to decrease overall system error as more sensors are added.

My point is that "bad" build quality is basically a non-difference. It was never a problem, or it's a manufactured problem in people's minds. Sure, tesla is probably "worse" from a statistical perspective but the average buyer could never see this. You almost have to be looking to see it, and so you're not gonna see it unless all your other problems are solved.

Like if every OEM sets out to build a car of the same specs, they're gonna all be within spitting distance of each other. You'll have to scrape the bottom of the barrel (i.e. "muh build quality) to find differences.

Tesla was winning before because they were the only ones who set out to build a car of that nature, build quality was a non-issue because it simply isn't an issue. It only became a meaningful one after the fact when more cars of the same sort arrived on scene and people went looking for minutia.

Googling suggests the Tesla cameras do 36 fps https://x.com/nextbigfuture/status/1895692497898390021

I’m not arguing from a statistical perspective and nor are buyers using that.

When Tesla came out, its build quality was awful but it succeeded because people wanted EVs.

Now there are EVs that don’t feel like Mattel toys, and Tesla is doing very very badly, in part because its build quality is still very bad which is now a glaring problem in a more competitive field.

I agree pretty much with your entire thread, but if Elon was Warren Buffet people who think Tesla is a premium brand would still buy them. It wasn't the lies or the quality that turned people off, it's the cost, lack of customer support and - most impact-fully - that Elon is a whiney little man child and performs racist actions.

5mp 36fps. 1mp on older Teslas.

False equivalence

Humans don't see around 25fps, it depends but the maximum for a trained person or competitive player is 300hz

Do you know small cars that are not utter shite?

If Tesla hypothetically made a small car, which model it should compete against?

They are American vehicles being compared on the dimension "quality-for-dollar" as mentioned above. Direct equivalence.

You realise there are more than one category.

To start you are comparing wrong segments (premium vs luxury), wrong platform (ice vs ev) and wrong generations (plush shitbox vs self driving sports spacemobile).

Compare to Rivian or Lucid and Tesla is actually cheapest (and yes worst interior).

That's a lot of words to say the same thing I just said (minus the weird cope about a "shitbox vs spacemobile")

Now that there's competition in EVs, Tesla's shittiness is extremely problematic.

The BMW i3 was an interesting car, it's a pity they cancelled it and don't offer it with current drive train / battery. There are 3rd party battery upgrades available though if you get a used one.

except they're gas guzzlers? better to compare EVs to EVs