As the electric vehicle market heats up, Ford's Mach-E faces a daunting challenge against Tesla's Model Y. Let me explain.
Ford sold ~40k NEW units in the US in 2022. There are ~1,830 used Mach-E's for sale in the US as of today.
Tesla Model Y sold 231k in the same period. There are ~1,568 used Model Y's in the US sitting in dealer lots. There's another ~200 or so on Tesla's own lots using Tesla's inventory search tool on their site.
About 4.5% of Ford's 2022 Mach-E sales are sitting in used dealer lots. For Tesla, it's about 0.7%. In other words, there are about 6.5x more Mach-Es sitting on used dealer lots vs the Model Y when adjusting for on hand inventory and volumes from each automaker.
As of right now, you cannot spec a new Mustang from Ford's website and have to search through existing inventory to select your car.
The cheapest Ford Mach E I was able to find NEW in the US, using Ford's website, after federal EV tax credit and before dealer markups/options/fees is ~$45k USD. There's only a handful of these available in the entire country from my research. The cheapest Tesla Model Y after federal EV tax credit is $39.5k, which you can buy new from Tesla's website using their configurator, or by searching existing inventory.
In 2023, Ford is forced to do 1 of 2 things in order to dramatically increase its volume:
1) Justify the $6k premium on the Mustang relative to its closest competitor, the Model Y
or
2) Cut prices by upwards of 20%+ across the entire line up
Option 1 can be done through advertising and ensuring the car offers additional feature sets vs the Model Y. This will be tough to do since the Model Y has a demonstrably better charging network to the Mach-E's (until Tesla opens up all their stalls), as well as safety, driver assist features, etc. However, the Ford is a great looking car and offers significantly better driving dynamics than an ICE vehicle in its class, as well as better running costs due to much lower maintenance and no gas costs. Ford can try to target this customer base in order to grow its sales.
Option 2 will be much more effective to lure in buyers during the current economic downturn that we are experiencing, but this means Ford will have to cut further into its already poor EV margins of -40%.
I'll be keeping a close eye on Ford's decisions regarding the Mach-E and what their plan is to stoke sales in the coming months and quarters. I think the Mach-E is a sweet car, but Ford will need to do something quite significant in the short to medium term to ensure sales don't fall off a cliff.
You can find all used car listings here: https://my.caredge.com/buy?make=Ford&inventoryType=used&model=Mustang+Mach-E&sortBy=dist&sortOrder=asc
That is a little misleading, since when looking at Tesla inventory, you will only see "one" of a specific model and configuration, regardless of how many at that site meet that spec.