Let’s just start with some numbers. Below are USA sales totals for the month of August from several top luxury car brands. Additionally, I’ve included estimates for Tesla’s USA sales and Tesla’s USA car sales (the latter of which excludes the Model X). While we don’t have precise numbers from Tesla, there is now confirmation from CEO Elon Musk that there were more Tesla Model 3 sales in the USA in August than BMW car sales (excluding SUVs). That means that Tesla sold more cars than any other luxury car brand (again, that excludes SUVs from some brands — Lexus, BMW, and perhaps Mercedes-Benz).
| Brand |
August 2018 Sales
|
| Acura | 15,072 |
| Audi | 20,907 |
| BMW | 23,789 |
| BMW Cars | 14,450 |
| Infiniti | 10,796 |
| Jaguar Land Rover | 9,648 |
| Lexus | 28,622 |
| Lexus Cars | 8,926 |
| Mercedes-Benz | 20,339 |
| Mercedes-Benz Cars | 8,806 |
| Tesla (estimate) | 21,000 |
| Tesla Cars (estimate) | 19,000 |
To be clear, our sales estimate for all Tesla vehicles is 21,000 due to an estimate of 17,000 deliveries of the Model 3 and 4,000 deliveries of the Model S and Model X (approximately 2,000 each).
As you can see, that means that Tesla, a company that has been mass producing cars for barely more than 6 years, is already seeing more USA car sales than BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Audi, Acura, Infiniti, Jaguar Land Rover, and Lexus.
This is rather shocking — even to me. Of course, we saw it coming and I predicted two weeks ago that Tesla would pass BMW car sales in the country. However, stepping back for a moment and realizing that Tesla is a 15 year old company that started producing the Model S just 6 years ago is just mind-blowing.
Tesla CEO & Chairman Elon Musk is being attacked left and right these days for short retorts and big proposals passed to the world via Twitter. What is getting much less attention in the mainstream media — or no attention — is that Tesla just passed up century-old legacy automakers in terms of USA sales. What is not being explained is that Tesla’s “extreme manufacturing” approach, despite coming with some challenges, has enabled Tesla to go from selling almost no cars in 2012 to selling approximately 25,000 cars a month today (with ~21,000 of those being in the USA until the company starts shipping Model 3s to Europe, Asia, Australia, and the Middle East).
Here at CleanTechnica, we’ve started tracking Tesla headlines in the mainstream media. This week so far, out of 63 headlines, we’ve found that 43 insinuate something negative about Tesla while only 9 offer positive implications for the company. Furthermore, there is not yet a single positive headline about Tesla sales.
That’s right — following a month in which Tesla, shockingly, sold more cars in the USA than BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Lexus, Acura, Audi, Infiniti, or Jaguar, not a single mainstream media outlet is highlighting this insane accomplishment.
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