Ford Takes Besting From Tesla

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Jan 16, 10:45AM EST

Follow 24/7 Wall St. on Google

This post may contain links from our sponsors and affiliates, and Flywheel Publishing may receive compensation for actions taken through them.

Ford Takes Besting From Tesla — © RoschetzkyIstockPhoto / iStock Editorial via Getty Images

Shareholders were upset when Tesla dropped the price of its cars sharply. They assumed Tesla’s sales were in trouble. However, others assumed that the move would trigger a new surge in sales. Enough people viewed the situation in this way that new Tesla competitors took a savage beating in the stock market. None took a hammering worse than Ford, which has bet its future on EVs. (These are the cheapest electric vehicles you can buy.)
[nativounit]
Ford has bested Tesla based on share price over the last year. It is a hollow victory. Ford’s stock has sold down 50%, and Tesla’s down by 65%. However, Tesla’s market cap is $387 billion. Ford’s is $51 billion. Gamblers continue to bet on the smaller company.

Tesla delivered 1,313,851 cars last year. Ford delivered a few tens of thousands. These were driven by the Mustang Mach-E, which had sales of 35,498, and the Ford F-150 Lightning, which had sales of 15,617. The difference between Tesla’s number and Ford’s shows how long the road is for the second-largest car company to catch up.

Ford and Tesla have another substantial difference. As Tesla drops its price, Ford has sharply pushed the prices of its EVs much higher. This has been the case with the Mustang Mach-E and the Lightning. Ford says it had to do this because it guessed wrong about how much it would cost to manufacture the two vehicles. It was one of the largest unforced errors by any car company in 2022. (These are the least reliable cars in America.)
[wallst_email_signup]
Ford’s EV future will be determined in the short term by how many EVs it sells this year, not whether Tesla stumbles. Tesla’s growth rate may be slower than it has been in the last few years, but Ford’s growth will have to be stupendous.

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.