(Bloomberg) -- Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) Inc. is giving Daimler AG (DE:DAIGn) and BMW AG a stiffer test in the U.S. luxury auto market. But despite what one might read in Elon Musk’s Twitter feed, it’s not yet the top dog.
The Tesla chief executive officer shared an article written by a Forbes contributor Thursday that noted the company delivered more than 90,000 vehicles in the last three months of 2018. The contributor wrote that this represented the first time Tesla outsold Daimler’s Mercedes-Benz in a quarter.
The problem is, the 90,700 delivery figure Tesla reported was a global result. Mercedes sold 90,575 in the U.S. alone during the same period.
Tesla doesn’t report its U.S. sales on a monthly or quarterly basis like all other major automakers in the market, so it’s difficult to tell how much ground the company is actually gaining on Mercedes or BMW on American soil. But at least one of the two German giants has given Musk credit for starting to make an impact.
“Tesla is now ramping up their volumes, and it’s putting pressure on that market segment,” Bernhard Kuhnt, chief executive officer of BMW North America, told Bloomberg News in an Oct. 2 interview.