Tesla forced to admit real prices

Germany legislators have succeeded where the US has failed: reining in a misleading Tesla marketing campaign that massively underinflates the price of the Model 3.

While America controversially shied away from chastising Tesla’s recent price listing, which sliced the estimated cost of fuel savings off the sticker figure, Germany has pushed back.

An investigation by Wettbewerbszentrale, the Munich-based consumer watchdog, found that the pricing was misleading and breached fair-competition laws, forcing Tesla to revise its list prices up by €5000 ($A8000).

It had been promoting its all-wheel drive Model 3 in Germany for 51,380, which had an asterix explaining in fine print that it included a deduction of €5000 of fuel savings over five years.

Tesla agreed with the Wettbewerbszentrale to drop the “after estimated savings” tactic from March 20, which puts a dampener on its hopes of converting Germans to its electric cars.

Wettbewerbszentrale is not a Government body, but is a 1200-member, self-regulatory body companies that police and maintain voluntary competition rules.

The organisation found Tesla had intentionally written the pricing campaign in a way that was: "arbitrary, lacking transparency and infringing rules on actual and clear pricing".

It’s not the first time Tesla has fallen foul of German rules, either.

Germany’s Transport Department removed the Model S from its list of cars qualifying for the nation’s €4000 ($A6300) EV (or $A4800 for plug-in hybrids) Umweltbonus incentive, introduced as part of its push to have a million EVs on its roads by the end of 2020.

It capped the price point for the incentive at €60,000 so that the well-heeled Germans didn’t sponge it all up and leave buyers of cheaper cars trapped with combustion technology. The German Government paid half and the carmakers were expected to contribute the other half.

So Tesla made a stripped-out Model S that officially slipped beneath the €60,000 ceiling until it was suddenly removed from the list because it simply could not be bought in Germany at the claimed price.

The Federal Office of Economics and Export Control (BAFA) even asked 800 Tesla customers to repay the €2000 for the cancelled incentive because the purchase price of their cars was above €60,000.

The pricing scandal comes only days after Tesla slashed the prices of its cars in Australia.