Shares of Fisker (FSRN -12.70%), the Californian electric car maker that builds its EVs in Austria, tumbled 6.2% through noon ET on Wednesday.

To figure out why, just look at what's happening right next door to Fisker's manufacturing plant, in Germany.

Car sales in America and Germany

Fisker is not a large EV company -- yet. In all of 2023, the company says it sold only about 4,700 units of its Fisker Ocean electric SUV around the world. But already, the company is selling in at least a dozen countries: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States.

Right now, the company's biggest market is obviously the United States. But its more logical market for expansion, and potentially its most lucrative considering where it builds its cars (Austria) and the cost of transporting them to buyers, is Germany -- Europe's biggest market for electric vehicles, situated right next door to Austria. But here's the problem:

As Automotive News Europe reported yesterday, whereas EV sales in the U.S. are merely slowing, in Germany they are projected to reverse and decline. Despite the German government's hopes of getting 15 million EVs on the Autobahn by 2030, German EV sales are expected to decline from 524,000 units in 2023 to just 451,000 units in 2024 -- a rollback of 14%.

What this means for Fisker

Any number of factors are being blamed for the reversal in Germany -- inflation and high car costs, "range anxiety" among car buyers, and especially a decision by the German government to cancel EV subsidies in December of last year. The end result of all this, though, is that car sales in Germany are expected to fall by 1% this year, and electric car sales will fall 14 times faster.

That's going to make it very hard for Fisker to rack up appreciable sales in Germany, especially given competition from other, larger companies established there, like Volkswagen and Tesla. It means Fisker will have to build cars mostly for export to places farther away, and more expensive to reach, if it wants to grow its numbers.

And it means that Fisker stock, which already wasn't expected to turn its first profit until 2027 at the earliest, remains as far away from profitability as ever.