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Tesla Model 3 in the Berlin showroom
Photo: Sean Gallup / Getty Images
The boom in electric cars and the lack of chips in factories are shaking the usual car hierarchy in this country.
The eternal bestseller VW Golf barely sold more than the Model 3 from Tesla in September.
The US company has been flying high for months.
The Melting lead of the Golf is still exactly 58 vehicles: The Golf comes to 6886 new registrations in September, the Model 3 to 6828. This is based on figures from the Federal Motor Transport Authority on Thursday.
At Tesla in particular, the monthly registration numbers fluctuate greatly.
The company is known for delivering a particularly large number of vehicles at the end of the quarter - also to impress investors with good three-month figures.
In the current year as a whole, the Golf is still clearly ahead: 78,814 units were delivered, compared to 23,982 Model 3. In the first nine months of the year, however, the Tesla climbed to third place in the middle class - behind the VW Passat and BMW 3 Series as well as in front of the Audi A4 and Mercedes C-Class.
Overall, there is a lot of movement in the market: for example, externally chargeable cars with electric motors achieved a record share of almost 29 percent in September.
The high value is also due to the fact that cars with internal combustion engines are particularly badly affected by the lack of semiconductors.
A total of almost 197,000 cars were registered - a decrease of 26 percent compared to the previous year.
Missing semiconductors are currently the biggest problem facing the automotive industry.
For example, 130,000 Golfers ordered cannot currently be built at VW's main plant in Wolfsburg.
Opel is even shutting down its plant in Eisenach completely for months, and BMW is also warning of further consequences of the lack of chips.
BMW was able to cushion the shortages in semiconductors in the third quarter better than Mercedes-Benz.
From July to the end of September, the Munich-based company sold 593,000 vehicles of all three group brands, twelve percent fewer than in the same period of the previous year.
Mercedes-Benz was 30 percent below the previous year in the third quarter.
Tesla is also feeling the chip crisis, but not as strongly as some competitors.
In the spring, the manufacturer began paying in advance for its chips from Taiwan and South Korea in order to secure supplies.
Tesla plans to start production in its new Gigafactory in Grünheide, Brandenburg, this year, thereby expanding its global production capacities.
fww / dpa
