The certified pre-owned market has already eclipsed 2 million sales for 2015, which appears to be the fastest the industry has ever reached this mark in a year.  

Autodata Corp. said Wednesday that the year-to-date CPO sales tally through 10 months is at 2.14 million, a full 10 percent ahead of last year’s pace.  

To put that in perspective, in the entirety of 2013, there were 2.11 million certified sales.

As for the most recent month, there were 213,615 CPO sales for October, which beats the year-ago figure by 5.5 percent, according to Autodata.

Not to mention, three best-ever months were reported: FCA Group, Lexus and Subaru.

Perhaps the only real negative for the month was that the daily selling rate (7,629) was a bit sluggish compared to other months of 2015. It beat the year-ago pace by 1.8 percent, but fell 10 percent month-over-month and was the second-slowest DSR of 2015, according to Autodata.

And even that takes into account that there were 28 selling days.  

The math (and path) to 2 million

In 2013, there was a total of 2.11 million CPO sales for the year, according to Autodata numbers previously reported in Auto Remarketing. This was the first time the industry had sold 2 million or more certified vehicles in a year. 

Given that there were 171,280 certified sales in December of that year, the 2 million mark had to have been reached in the year's final month. 

Last year, the 2 million mark was reached in November — that month's CPO sales tally of 192,952 pushed the year-to-date sum (through 11 months) to 2.14 million. There ended up being a grand total of 2.34 million certified sales in 2014. 

Breakdown by automakers

The Big 3 sold 76,641 CPO units in October, relatively steady (up 0.8 percent) from the prior year. Through 10 months, they have moved 781,960 certified vehicles for a 13.6-percent gain.

Asian-brand CPO sales reached 101,783 for October (up 10.8 percent), with the yearly tally moving closer to 1 million at 990,199 sales (up 8.1 percent).

There were 35,191 European-brand CPO sales for the month (up 1.8 percent), and the year-to-date sum is at 370,346 (up 8 percent). 

Update on Tesla CPO

Elsewhere in the CPO market, there’s been some media and industry buzz about Tesla’s certified pre-owned program.

In the company’s third-quarter shareholder letter, Tesla gave an update on its CPO offering.

According to the letter, the number of pre-owned Tesla vehicles sold in Q3 exceeded the number of customer trade-ins received, which resulted in a 17-percent reduction in trade-in unit inventory.

Staff writer Sarah Rubenoff contributed to this story.