Model 3 easily outpaced its German car competition
Tesla is selling every Model 3 it can screw together. Astonishingly, it’s selling so many of them that the Model 3 outsold every BMW passenger car combined. We should note that BMW still leads if you include SUV sales, but beating the Germans at passenger cars is no small feat.
Here’s the number breakdown: BMW sold 14,450 passenger cars in the U.S. market in August. This number includes sales from compact crossovers like the X1 and X2 as well. That’s a 13.5 percent decrease in car sales from August 2017. Car sales tracking site GoodCarBadCar lists Model 3 sales at 20,450 for the month of August. However, that’s only an estimate because Tesla doesn’t report official sales numbers. Other news outlets have estimated figures in the 17,000 range. And Bloomberg’s Tesla Tracker site puts the current production level of the Model 3 at 4,800 cars per week. But any of the estimates are safely above BMW’s exact figure. The BMW 3 Series (the Model 3’s direct competitor) sold only 3,751 cars in August.
Tesla Model3 (Image: Wikimedia/Carlquinn)
Lexus led the luxury vehicle segment, but its big winners were crossovers. From the start of the year, BMW is up compared to 2017 because of its SUVs as well. Tesla certainly isn’t experiencing the same drop in car interest after this surprising month of sales. As for the BMW i3, it sold all of 418 cars last month. The company’s only pure EV will be eclipsed by the new generation of electrics that BMW has in the works.
Selling this many Model 3s isn’t particularly surprising given the 420,000 reservations remaining as of July. It’s unlikely that all those turn into orders, but it explains why sales are so ludicrous at the moment. And In a week when the Mercedes EQC electric crossover was revealed and BMW is almost ready to show its Vision iNext concept, Tesla is starting to hear hoofbeats from competitors and needs to sell Model 3s as fast as it can.
Read more: Autoblog