(Bloomberg) -- Tesla's (NASDAQ:TSLA) Model Y was Europe’s best-selling car in September, zipping past some of the regions most popular combustion-engines models as battery-powered vehicles continue to gain traction.
With deliveries more than tripling compared to a year ago to just over 29,000 cars, the Model Y led by a significant margin to Peugeot’s 208 city car with about 19,600 units, Jato said Thursday. The crossover, produced at Tesla’s plant in Germany starting this year, offset a plunge in sales of the Model 3 following a lack of imports from the carmaker’s plant in China.
Tesla sales in Europe tend to perform particularly well during the last month of every quarter, Jato said. Even so, total third-quarter deliveries rose 17% from a year earlier and almost doubled compared with 2020.
Europe’s car market has remained dogged for much of the year by protracted supply-chain problems curtailing production. While some of that pressure is lifting, the region’s consumers are now contending with multiplying energy bills and surging interest rates that have started to weigh on demand. Most carmakers have stayed resilient so far as they catch up on many unfilled orders.
“The market lost one million units per quarter over the last three years,” Jato global analyst Felipe Munoz said in a statement. “While a catastrophe in terms of volume relative to production capacity, the majority of carmakers have now properly adapted to this new reality.”
Fully-electric cars made up 15.6% of total registrations during the first nine months of the year. In September, combined Tesla Model Y and Model 3 sales rose to nearly 42,000, four times as many as Volkswagen's (ETR:VOWG_p) ID.4 and ID.3.
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