May 9, 2025 - 1:00pm
There are still orange farmers in Israel and apple orchards in South Africa. Nestlé remains one of the world’s leading food conglomerates. Chick-fil-A continues to stretch America’s waistband.
Consumer boycotts tend to be examples of ultimate luxury politics. Excluding the Montgomery bus boycott of the 1960s, there are few examples that truly changed the direction of travel. That was until the conservative-led Bud Light boycott, which had a significant impact.
No wonder, then, that the Left wants a boycott of its own. The news that Tesla has been tanking with shares down 28% this year has been seized upon as evidence that Elon Musk’s decision to go all-in on Trump is “destroying his company”.
If only it were so. It’s certainly true that Musk’s electric vehicle maker is spluttering. In 2025, the company has experienced a decline of 62% year-on-year in Britain, 46% in Germany and an astonishing 73.8% in the Netherlands.
But the underlying reality is actually far more worrying for him. The Chinese are coming faster and harder than anyone had imagined even two years ago. Among the sales stats, it was revealed that while Tesla had dropped 36% in Spain, BYD was up 644%. In Britain, Tesla has been beaten by such Chinese behemoths as Chery and Omoda, names we will have to get used to.
There is only so much pie to go around. And ultimately the problem for the company is not that its brand has become tarnished. It is simply that consumers don’t care. Whatever status it has accrued has never quite congealed into true loyalty. Perhaps we are simply no longer in that era of loyalty. China’s sudden brace of car firms are taking the same approach to cars as they did with knock-off AirPods: 80% of the quality for half the price.
Musk surely recognises this. He has refreshed his mass market sedan, the Model Y. But that is now in the rear view mirror. For Tesla, the future can’t be in the mass market: he needs to be Apple, not Huawei. In that sense, it can only lie in Tesla’s innovation advantages. The cachet of the Cybertruck, the futurism of his forthcoming autonomous taxi vehicle, and the cutting edge of his Roadster sports car.
Ironically enough, it may lie in China. Musk’s greatest note of dissent with his new boss in the White House was to signal that he is opposed to tariffs. Ironically, perhaps, given that the 100% EV tariff introduced by Joe Biden — and coupled to fresh measures by Donald Trump — has effectively kept the US market as a walled garden where Tesla can still make half its sales.
But another third of Musk’s sales are already in China itself, where he has a Gigafactory: the first factory to be wholly owned in the country without a local “partner”. America is a static market; China is a growth plan.
Britain is an afterthought. In truth, British consumers have never really taken to Tesla. It’s not quite our style: it feels like a luxury-priced product, yet without the luxury signalling as we understand it. The precipitous sales drop meant that the company vended only 512 cars in April: no longer a statistically meaningful absolute number from which to compare. And besides, when it comes to the EV wars, Britain is now a radical outlier.
While the US sits behind its moat of 100%-plus tariffs, and the EU works on its own scaled “anti-subsidy” tariffs of between 17-45% (with more hikes to come), in this one realm only Britain has decided to embrace its liberal first principles: we simply do not have an anti-China tariff regime.
Who knows how the present global experiment with protectionism will end — but Britain may be able to stave off the worst from both sides.
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