Ford Flat as Tesla Surges

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published May 26, 8:30AM EDT

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Ford Flat as Tesla Surges — © Toa55 / iStock via Getty Images

In a deal between two rivals, Ford Motor Co. (NYSE: F | F Price Prediction) electric vehicles (EVs) will have access to Tesla Inc.’s (NASDAQ: TSLA) approximately 12,000 Supercharger stations. It is not entirely clear why Tesla’s Elon Musk would do this, but it is done. Perhaps he sees his lead over Ford in EV sales as so large that he does not care. Indeed, Wall Street has acknowledged the gulf in how it treated the two stocks this year. (These 20 cars have been completely redesigned for 2023.)
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Year to date, Ford’s shares are off about 1% and trade near their 52-week low. At the same time, Tesla’s are up by 72%. Ford’s market cap is $46 billion, while Tesla’s is $585 billion. The gulf is almost ridiculous.
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Ford will be fortunate to sell 100,000 EVs in the United States this year. Tesla could sell just short of 2 million vehicles, although it is unclear how many are in the United States. Tesla also controls the industry’s pricing, which is evident as it has dropped the price of its vehicles to pick up market share. Ford’s CEO has admitted a price battle will cut into his EV margins. Just how large that cut will be depends to some extent on Tesla’s pricing.
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Ford recently made a presentation about its next generation of EVs. Investors ignored it. Ford has entered a “big hat, no cattle” phase of investor skepticism, which will not end until its EV sales skyrocket. Few people care if Ford claims its newer EVs will have better features.
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It is hardly worth the time to run through Ford’s litany of problems with its EV flagship F-150 Lightning. Pricing trouble and production problems head the list, and that can only hurt the Ford EV brand. Car buyers read the papers.

Ultimately, Musk can be generous because he does not think generosity counts if Ford has too few EVs on the road for it to matter.

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.