Audi has reported a record first quarter with deliveries rising 15.4 percent in March to 170,450 vehicles, the luxury division's best month of all time.
Deliveries for the first three months of the year jumped 11.7 percent to 412,850 cars, a record for Audi and a sign that the automaker could beat out rivals BMW and Mercedes-Benz.
The carmaker, which is under the Volkswagen umbrella, saw boosted demand in Europe, where models in the expanded A3 lineup made up almost 50 percent of deliveries worldwide, Reuters reported.
"As the top European premium brand, Audi surely benefits disproportionately from the region's unfolding recovery," Marc-Rene Tonn, an analyst with Hamburg-based M.M. Warburg, told Reuters.
Audi's sales in Europe were up 7.2 percent last month, and the carmaker saw a double-digit growth in sales in Germany and the U.K.
The luxury carmaker's first-quarter deliveries of 412,850 compares with the 374,276 vehicles sold by Mercedes-Benz.
BMW's March delivery figures will be published later this week. The Munich-based automaker has been No. 1 in the luxury segment for nine years in a row, although Audi has been a challenger to that title so far this year.
Having beaten out BMW and Mercedes-Benz for the first two months of the year, Audi has big plans for the rest of 2014, including 17 new or updated vehicles.
The Ingolstadt, Germany-headquartered company, which has never been No. 1 for a whole year, plans to invest $30.5 billion in the next five years to spur growth.
"Competition in the premium segment is more intense than ever," Audi Chief Executive Officer Rupert Stadler told Bloomberg last month. "We're ahead of our two main rivals in the first two months, but this doesn't really interest me much. Our focus is on further growth."
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