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Elon Musk, the love-or-hate CEO of Tesla Inc, has often cited a popular electric vehicle online blog in reference to Tesla's sales numbers or other accomplishments.

This past September the automaker was in the midst of rapidly ramping up Model 3 production in order to fulfill the long backlog of preorders for their budget-friendly (by EV standards) entry level sedan.

Musk took no pause to take to Twitter to retweet a note from 'InsideEVs' that lauded the company for dominating the plug-in hybrid U.S. auto market. Here is Elon's tweet:

Great work by Tesla Team! https://t.co/ryXw9fxGv8

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 3, 2019

While InsideEVs is not an official source of industry news and data, it was validated somewhat by the CEO of Tesla itself citing their numbers as fact.

Now that same blog has struck out with some not-so-very positive news in regards to the EV-maker out of Palo Alto, CA.

They claim that a mere 12,000 Model 3s were sold in total for January and February in the States. For comparison, there were over 25,000 Model 3s sold in December alone.

InsideEVs, for its part, actually publishes its methodologyon how it goes about estimated sales volumes for hybrids and EVs. It uses publicly available information such as VIN numbers and independent reporting by buyers over the internet. The blog actually states that they are within 4 percent accuracy for sales volume reports.

Before anyone should get too worked up over such a such a sharp decline in sales they should know that Tesla is shipping bulk volumes of the Model 3 to Europe and China for the first time, and since the company has been selling as many as they can make for quite some time, it makes sense that actual deliveries would take an impact, at least stateside.

Lastly, the U.S. federal tax credit for EV's started to wind down last year. What began 2018 as a $7,500 credit ended up as a $3,750 credit for the 2019 year. An almost four thousand dollar decrease in a direct incentive like that would surely have an effect on demand for the Model 3, perhaps less so on the $100k Model X and Model S.

Industry pundits and analysts didn't take the news as particularly alarming as Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) shares ended the day flat. Prices for Tesla stock have slid more than 13 percent in the last week.