Tesla increases its lead on the US luxury sedan market, beating Mercedes, BMW and Audi

Tesla shocked the industry earlier this year when it confirmed having delivered 25,202 Model S sedans in the U.S. in 2015, which gave the company a 25% market share in the premium sedan market. For the first time, Tesla had surpassed market leaders like BMW and Mercedes. Furthermore, every single other large luxury sedan has seen its sales decrease during the same period.

Now the electric automaker is increasing its lead on the US luxury sedan market to such a point that the Model S is now twice as popular as the Mercedes S-Class or the BMW 7-Series. Tesla is literally selling more all-electric sedans in the US than Mercedes and BMW are selling S-Class and 7-Series combined.

That’s based on data obtained by IHS Markit during the third quarter 2016.

Tesla announced its delivery numbers earlier this month for the third quarter 2016 and confirmed that it delivered a record-breaking number of vehicles: 24,500.

• Model S: 15,800
• Model X: 8,700

Those numbers are global deliveries as Tesla doesn’t breakdown deliveries per market, but IHS looked into registrations and came up with this chart for US sales during Q3 2016 (chart via Bloomberg Update: Bloomberg corrected their article stating that the data doesn’t actually come from IHS but from Tesla):

Both Tesla and BMW released updated models prior and during the period that significantly helped their sales. Tesla introduced a refreshed version of the Model S with a facelift in April and a few new battery options were made available in the following months which likely boosted sales.

The company released a less expensive version with a 75 kWh battery pack software limited to 60 kWh and the new P100D version at the higher-end for a ludicrous acceleration from 0 to 60 mph in 2.5 seconds – making the Model S the ‘Quickest Production Car in the World’.

Tesla is now producing and selling vehicles at a rate of roughly 100,000 per year. It’s a 5x increase in capacity over a 3 year period. Now Tesla wants another 5x increase in order to produce 500,000 vehicles per year within the first year of Model 3 production.

CEO Elon Musk said that he expects Tesla to achieve the production rate in 2018 after the Model 3 starts production in “late 2017”. Of course, the company hopes to have a similar impact on the midsize luxury sedan market with the Model 3 as the Model S is having on the large luxury sedan market.

Tesla is off to go start with around 400,000 reservations for the Model 3 already, but the automaker now needs to bring the vehicle to production on schedule.