GM And Ford Post Strong EV Sales

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Jul 10, 11:06AM EDT

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GM And Ford Post Strong EV Sales — © 2010 General Motors / Getty Images News via Getty Images

Cox Automotive released data on EV sales in the US in the second quarter of the year. Overall, EV sales rose 8.3% to 330,000, or 8% of the total cars and light trucks sold for the period. Several car companies, including GM (NYSE: GM | GM Price Prediction) and Ford (NYSE: F), picked up market share. Ford’s stock has been hammered recently.

Tesla’s (NASDAQ: TSLA) market share fell below 50% for the first time. It was 49.7%, down from 59.3% in the same quarter last year. This allowed other companies to increase their percentages of the overall market. Cox said the winners exceeded GM and Ford, including Hyundai and Kia, the two largest South Korean manufacturers.

GM and Ford have put billions of dollars into EV R&D and production. Each only sells a few thousand EVs a month, but those numbers have risen by double digits. Even if the EV market stays relatively flat, more erosion in Tesla’s numbers means benefits for the two largest US car companies.

Ford and GM still have to operate in a market where Americans have lowered their interest in EV purchases. The reasons include expensive EVs, fear of range, and a low number of charging stations. The two US car companies say they produce EVs with price points below $25,000, but their availability maybe two or more years away.

The EV market in the US could also change as Chinese EV companies try to import cars priced below $25,000. Tariffs of as much as 100% have blocked that. These Chinese companies have decided to move their efforts to India, Southeast Asia, South America, and Africa. There is a question of whether consumer demand for these cars will eventually affect the US tariffs.

Ford and GM have started to get some yield from years of EV development and extraordinarily high investments.

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.