Mercedes and BMW have an annual contest in the U.S. in which they try to best each other in sales, because Cadillac is a sadness and the Germans — including Audi — have been on top for years now, in addition to Lexus. But it’s true also that Tesla is beginning to pose its own threat in the luxury race.
The simple fact is that Tesla is American luxury now. Cadillac delivered 129,495 cars in the U.S. last year, down 17 per cent from 2019; Lincoln delivered 105,410 in the U.S. last year, down over six per cent from 2019. And while Tesla only gives global sales figures, Experian crunched some registration data to conclude that over 200,000 Teslas were registered in the U.S. in 2020 — the actual sales number is likely around the same, or slightly lower.
Anyway, it was enough to surpass Audi and go fourth behind BMW, Lexus, and Mercedes-Benz.
From Automotive News:
The electric vehicle maker registered 200,561 vehicles last year to grab the No. 4 spot from Audi, which registered 183,594 vehicles. A year earlier, Audi topped Tesla by almost 50,000.
Tesla was roughly 65,000 registrations behind third-place Mercedes-Benz. Experts say that’s a testament to the brand’s cachet among premium buyers and its ability to get ahead of the competition with appealing EVs.
It should be said that the top five are tight, because while 200,561 Teslas were registered and 183,594 Audis, Mercedes, BMW, and Lexus all were neck-and-neck between 265,600 and 287,259, according to the Experian data.
It’s easy to imagine a world, in other words, where Tesla takes the premium sales crown and, by recent automotive history standards, quite quickly, which wasn’t an impossible thing to imagine a year or two ago, but “taking down the Germans” is a thing every luxury automaker says they’re going to do just before they fail to do it. And it’s possible Tesla will fail, too, and this is a plateau, but ask all the people who bet against Tesla in recent years how that’s going.