Ford Motor Co.’s home state of Michigan was the veteran automaker’s largest electric vehicle (EV) market in the U.S. for the first 10 months of 2021, with one in every five EV registrations in the state being a Mustang Mach-E — reports Automotive News.
The legacy automaker managed to register 1,235 Mustang Mach-E crossovers in Michigan, capturing 21% of the state’s EV market. However, Tesla still led with 43.5% (down about 10% year-over-year).
Michigan is proving to be a breakout state for Ford since the carmaker didn’t fare nearly as well in others. During the first 10 months of 2021, Tesla accounted for 69% of all EV registrations across the U.S., while Ford only had 5.4% to its name. 36% of all EVs registered in the U.S. during this time were Tesla Model Ys, while 30% were Tesla Model 3s.
According to Jessica Caldwell, Executive Director of Insights at Edmunds, Ford’s success in Michigan is a product of not only the growing demand for the Mustang Mach-E electric crossover but also strong brand loyalty in its home state and the prevalence of Ford employees, retirees, and employees of Ford’s suppliers who all have access to special discounts from the company, across Michigan.
Courtesy of data from Experian, here’s what the Ford-Tesla tussle for market share looked like in the former’s top five U.S. states by number of EVs registered between January 2021 and October 2021:
Ford CEO Jim Farley firmly believes the automaker has a “chance” to beat Tesla, once it is able to scale EV production that is. Step one for Ford is going to be doubling EV production to 600,000 units per year by 2024.
Tesla, meanwhile, is making inroads of its own across the globe. The EV giant beat analyst predictions to deliver a whopping 936,000 cars in 2021.
The sad truth here is that Tesla can sell more/expand faster than Ford can and so will continue picking up market share as they wipe out ICE sales altogether. Tesla can just crank out as many as they want but Ford has to be much more calculating about how and where they sell theirs because they can’t ramp fast enough to make significant numbers while mindful of not cratering their ICE sales too much. Projected combined Lightning and Mach E sales of about 600k by end of 2024 (2 years) is a decent ramp but by then Tesla will be selling at least 1.5M, probably closer to 2M vehicles in North America alone. I’m pretty sure Fords numbers were global which makes their effort seem even smaller. I don’t know how they recover from their late start, they should’ve been here years ago, but maybe they can still pull it off.