Now may be a good time to buy a used Tesla.

As chief executive Elon Musk embraces conservative politics, his electric vehicles (EVs) are facing backlash such as protests, vandalized vehicles and charging stations being set ablaze, including two incidents in Calgary this week.

It comes as the pace of EV adoption in Canada has slowed, but there are clear signs that Tesla is faring worse than some other EV makers.

There are more used Teslas in Canada than ever, and the price is dropping faster than the rest of the market, according to Autotrader.ca Inc., the new and used vehicle marketplace.

“I don’t know that we can attribute this to any one factor,” Baris Akyurek, vice president of insights and intelligence at AutoTrader.ca, said. “Overall, EV sales are going down, EV demand is down, so it’s hard to conclude what’s happening.”

In early March, the number of used Teslas listed on AutoTrader was up 12.5 per cent on a year-over-year basis, while the number of all other EVs listed on AutoTrader declined 3.1 per cent.

Tesla’s rising used inventory looks even more stark when measured against used internal combustion engine vehicle inventory on the site, which declined by 14.1 per cent during the time period.

The price of a used Tesla dropped 21.9 per cent during the time period, while all other EVs listed on AutoTrader fell 16.3 per cent.

“I wasn’t surprised by this,” Akyurek said. “We also look at the market in the U.S. and globally, and we saw this trend.”

In the United States, Edmunds.com Inc., a California-based market research firm, said Tesla experienced its “highest-ever share” of trade-ins for new or used cars from dealerships selling other brands.

In 2024, for the first time in more than a decade, Tesla delivered fewer vehicles than the previous year, albeit only one per cent less. It also reported an eight per cent decline in revenue from its automotive business in the fourth quarter of 2024. Since January, its stock has dropped 39 per cent to US$244.29 per share as of Friday afternoon.

This week, the company recalled an estimated 46,000 Cybertrucks over concerns that an exterior panel could fall off.

Musk, still the world’s richest man with a fortune estimated between US$350 billion and US$500 billion, has come under fire on a near-daily basis for his role overseeing what he calls DOGE — the U.S. Department of Government Efficiency — which is dismantling various U.S. federal government agencies in an attempt to slash spending or refashion government services.

But Akyurkek said the average price of a used Tesla began falling in early 2023, which would predate his role in the Donald Trump administration. Of course, Musk has long courted controversy.

In 2022, Musk, also the owner of X, the social-media platform formerly known as Twitter, tweeted a meme that compared former prime minister Justin Trudeau to Adolf Hitler, but he deleted it.

In 2023, Musk waded into controversy when he curtailed Ukraine’s use of satellite internet service provider Starlink, which is owned by another company he’s CEO of, Space Exploration Technologies Corp.

Another factor clouding the situation, Akyurek said, is that the used car marketplace is in a bit of an odd place. The gyrations caused by the pandemic, supply chain shocks and the microchip shortage meant that Canada produced 1.5 million fewer cars between 2020 and 2023 than would have been expected under ordinary circumstances.

That’s now catching up with the used vehicle marketplace because leases generally expire after about four years, pushing more vehicles into the used car marketplace.

Regardless of what happens to Tesla, the EV transition in Canada is generally facing down a rough patch.

In 2024, EVs accounted for 13.8 per cent of the marketplace, or about 264,277 vehicles, with Quebec accounting for 53.9 per cent of that total.

But in February, the first full month since the federal and Quebec’s provincial incentives to purchase an EV expired, sales collapsed, according to researcher DesRosiers Automotive Consultants Inc.

DesRosiers did not disclose the exact drop, but said the decline in EV sales led to an overall automotive market decline of 21.9 per cent.

• Email: gfriedman@postmedia.com

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