Registrations tripled in France, nearly doubled in Norway. After the worst year in recent memory, Tesla’s sales numbers are moving in the right direction again. The question is whether a cheaper Model Y and surpassing a stumbling BYD again are enough to call this a recovery.
A year ago, Tesla was bleeding. Exactly one year ago, registrations across Europe were cut in half. Elon Musk’s increasingly polarising political adventures had turned what was once aspirational Silicon Valley cool into a brand liability of the first order.
88% rise in Belgium
March 2026 tells the story of how fast customers forget. In France, 9,569 new Teslas were registered, a 203% increase year-on-year and a whisker below the all-time monthly record of 9,572 set in December 2023. Italy climbed 32% to 2,920 units.
Spain rose 25% to 2,477. In the Nordic markets, the rebounds were even more dramatic: Norway up 178% to 6,150 vehicles, Sweden up 144% to 1,447, and Denmark up 96% to 1,784.
Also in Belgium, the brand saw an uptick, gaining 88% (1,806 registrations). Only Portugal bucked the trend, slipping 1.7% to 1,189 registrations even as overall EV sales in the country grew 24%.
Beating BYD
The main driver of the turnaround is not hard to identify. Late in 2025, Tesla began rolling out refreshed and repriced versions of its Model Y and Model 3 across Europe, with the Standard versions at more accessible price points.
The timing coincided with Musk backing away from politics. As the trend spreads across Europe, it seems sustainable and might persist for the rest of the year.
Globally, Tesla delivered 358,023 electric vehicles in Q1 2026, a 6.3% increase over the same period last year. But there is still a 50,000-vehicle gap between factory output and actual demand. This has Wall Street worried, one of the reasons the revived form hasn’t translated into stock value.
Tesla’s rise to the top of the global EV rankings is also partly a story about someone else’s bad quarter. BYD delivered 310,389 pure electric vehicles in Q1 2026, a 25.5% drop year-on-year – handing Tesla back the crown it lost in late 2023.
The Chinese giant sold nearly twice as many cars when PHEVs are included (695,772 new-energy vehicles), but on the pure-EV metric, Tesla leads again.
Not all ground recovered
BYD’s domestic difficulties are largely policy-driven. The Chinese government has slashed EV purchase subsidies, and while facing an aggressive price war in its home market, BYD is looking to export markets for growth. However, unlike Tesla, it remains a minor player in most Western markets, weighed down by import tariffs and a dealer network still being built from scratch.
Framing Tesla’s registration figures as a resurgence is an overstretch for the analysis. The Q1 2026 recovers some lost ground, but not all of it, and does so against a historically weak comparative quarter. Q1 2025 was one of Tesla’s worst in years.
Xiaomi lures in top manager
The structural challenges have not gone away either. Tesla remains overwhelmingly dependent on two aging platforms. Elon Musk has teased “something way cooler than a minivan” as Tesla’s next product, but until that arrives, the company is too dependent on yesterday’s hardware.
As a symbol of how competition is intensifying, Xiaomi has lured in Dieter Lorenz, Tesla’s Senior Manager of Delivery Operations for Central Europe, as its new Head of Delivery & Logistics Europe. The move is part of Xiaomi’s plan to gain a foothold in Europe by 2027. Xiaomi might turn out to be a more fierce contender to Tesla than BYD.
