It's very important to wonder "how much of this is EV demand" vs "how much of this is car specific demand". Tesla's Model 3 sales basically declined in lockstep with Model Y's rise: https://cleantechnica.com/2021/02/15/tesla-model-3-model-y-o...
It will be interesting to see if Tesla can grow them simultaneously going forward, but it hasn't really seemed to be the case. This doesn't make me bullish on any prediction that the Model Y is going to be the best selling vehicle globally.
All the other companies are changing production towards different other categories, but the “achievement” Tesla wants their shareholders to be happy about is that they sell more of the cars less and less people are buying.
If you sell more horses worldwide out of the “four legged category” it has no relevance as long as less and less people are buying horses for transportation.
I have no data to back it up, but it seems likely that the people who can afford a luxury car are also the people that could afford to stay home during the pandemic. Personally, I'm finding it hard to justify a new car when I'm 6 months overdue for an oil change and not even at half the miles. :-)
Tesla is of course also expecting to sell more CUV and Pickups in the future and we have seen the sales growth of the Model Y.
Seriously making the argument that being the globally highest selling car in a well known very well specified category with their first ever turley mass produced car after just a few years of production is not an achievement is just insane argument.
Given that this is literally the first mass market car by Tesla, achieving leading sales globally over comparable products by BMW and Mercedes is clearly pretty important.
And as they said, they hope Model Y will hopefully be the best selling vehicle globally next year.
This is important to point out after 5 years of FUD about how Tesla has no demand.