Tesla has announced it delivered "approximately 97,000" cars around the world in the third quarter of 2019. That sets a new record for the carmaker, slightly beating its second-quarter report of 95,356 cars delivered. Doing the math, that means Tesla has delivered 255,000 vehicles so far this year, which is more than it managed to deliver in total for 2018.

While it's cause for celebration, Tesla won't be uncorking the expensive bottle of bubbly just yet as there's still work to do. It still means Tesla needs to set another record in the fourth quarter to meet the total of 360,000 to 400,000 vehicles it estimated selling in 2019.

It still doesn't meet Tesla CEO Elon Musk's goal of 100,000 deliveries for the quarter, but the back-to-back delivery records are important and should help quell concerns that Tesla had exhausted the US market for Tesla 3 sales while struggling to get a strong foothold in Europe and China. In fact, Tesla says that 79,600 of the 97,000 cars delivered in the third quarter were Model 3s. Having answered that question though, the next issue comes down to profit, something Tesla has failed to make so far this year and the Silicon Valley automaker is still losing money.

It'll be at least a few weeks before Tesla releases the third-quarter financials, but we already know that Tesla lost $408 million in the second quarter, despite delivering 95,356 vehicles. That means unless people fully optioned out 1,644 cars and Tesla sold them over $248,000 apiece without added costs of doing business, it's unlikely Tesla saw a profit.

On the positive side though, this strong showing through 2019 should keep enough investors happy and a target of 105,000 cars delivered in the fourth quarter now doesn't look completely out of reach to meet Musk's 360,000+ estimated total for the year. That means all eyes will be on the Gigafactory in China that should be opening up for business before the end of the year.