Ford Mustang Mach-E stole sales from Tesla in February
Tesla still outsold rivals more than two times over, but it's a little victory for Ford.
It's a small win for team Ford with the new Mustang Mach-E electric SUV, according to the latest research from Morgan Stanley. The firm said in its latest Autos & Shared Mobility research report for February, seen by Roadshow, that Ford's electric SUV did a damn good job at siphoning sales away from Tesla .
Specifically, Tesla saw its share of the electric vehicle market decline from 81% in February 2020 to 69% in February 2021. Before I go any further, let me underscore that owning 69% of the market is still tremendous for Tesla. What's most striking about the drop is Morgan Stanley's finding that the Mustang Mach-E "accounted for nearly 100% of the loss." In other words, no other brand or EV did a better job than Ford's electric SUV at turning EV buyers away from Tesla and to an alternative car.
While this is certainly positive news for Ford and the Mustang Mach-E, we'll have to see if this sort of appeal keeps up. The SUV is brand new, after all, and it's easy to see high interest lead to big numbers at first. The fact that it's done such a bang-on job at converting Tesla customers, however, is intriguing. That's not to say Tesla had a bad February. Not at all. Morgan Stanley estimated Tesla sales last month at 21,550 vehicles compared to 9,527 for every other brand selling an EV. Tesla managed to outsell the combined competition by 2.3x. Undecided buyers may have liked the Mustang Mach-E, but there are still far more buyers trending in Teslas direction overall.
In the bigger picture, electric cars had a fantastic month in February. Total industry sales adjusted for the number of selling days dropped 5.4% compared to 2020, but at the same time, electric vehicle sales jumped 34%. Automakers without the Big T badge selling EVs saw sales skyrocket 105%. The Big T itself, meanwhile, was up 5.4% year-over-year, likely thanks to the Model Y and continued appeal of the Model 3 . If anything, we can take all of this as further evidence Tesla's appeal isn't impenetrable.