Tesla is on an absolute tear right now, with shares blasting past the $400 mark on Robinhood’s overnight trading desk and closing in on the all-time high of $407.36 we haven’t seen since the frenzy of late 2021. Wall Street is fully buying into the narrative again, driven by a barrage of bullish analyst notes. Bank of America just bumped their price target from $350 to $400 after getting some seat time with Full Self-Driving v13.2 down at the Texas gigafactory. The momentum is so heavy that even longtime bears are throwing in the towel. Craig Irwin over at Roth MKM practically capitulated last week, jacking his target from a measly $85 all the way up to $380 and admitting that the upside bias is simply too strong to bet against right now.
The vibe on the trading floor is heavily skewed toward the future. Nobody is really sweating the current 106.72 price-to-earnings ratio. Instead, the market is pricing in the upcoming rollout of a cheaper mass-market EV and Elon Musk’s Optimus humanoid robot. Sure, there are still some holdouts—Guggenheim kept their “sell” rating even while nudging their target to $175—but the broader consensus is getting drowned out by sheer AI and autonomy optimism.
But if you step away from the Silicon Valley hype engine and look at the brass tacks of moving actual metal, the narrative gets a lot messier. Take Germany, the undisputed heavyweight champion of the European auto market. According to a new deep dive by the used-car search platform AutoUncle, Tesla is rapidly losing its stranglehold on the secondary EV market over there. Back in the first quarter of 2023, nearly one out of every three used EVs sold by a dealer was a Tesla. Fast forward to Q1 2026, and that market share has absolutely cratered to just 6.8%. We’re talking one out of every fifteen cars.
Volkswagen has completely flipped the script. German dealers are now moving more than twice as many used VWs as they are Teslas. It’s a full-on legacy takeover: Audi, Mercedes, and even Opel have all leapfrogged Tesla, knocking the brand down to fifth place. The Volkswagen Group is basically flooding the zone with variety, pushing the entire ID lineup alongside the Skoda Enyaq, Elroq, and Cupra Born. Tesla, on the other hand, is still leaning on the Model 3 and Model Y for roughly 90% of its used volume.
Here is the catch, though: the sheer number of used Teslas changing hands hasn’t dropped. The company is actually moving more used inventory than ever. AutoUncle clocked over 6,100 used Teslas sold through German dealers in Q1 2026, which is about 3.6 times higher than what they were doing at the start of 2021. The issue is that the broader used EV market went super-nova, expanding by a staggering factor of 7.3 over the exact same window. As AutoUncle CEO Jonas Bylov put it, Tesla didn’t stall out; the rest of the industry just blew right past them.
This massive shift in the European landscape didn’t happen in a vacuum. Tesla’s aggressive strategy of slashing new car prices since 2023 threw a massive wrench into residual values, right as a tidal wave of off-lease vehicles from legacy automakers finally started hitting the secondary market. Pure EVs now account for nearly 7.7% of all vehicle ownership transfers in Germany. So while Wall Street is busy pricing Tesla as an untouchable robotics and tech juggernaut, the actual data on the ground proves that the core automotive side of the business has finally morphed into a crowded, cutthroat brawl.
