Ford Celebrates 150,000 Mustang Mach-Es, Lands Second in U.S. EV Sales
The Ford Mustang Mach-E is into its second year of production, believe it or not, and Ford is celebrating the assembly of the 150,000th Mustang Mach-e with optimism for the future of its EVs. The milestone Mustang Mach-e rolled off the line at Ford’s Cuautitlán (coo-ow-teet-lán) Stamping and Assembly Plant in Mexico state, where production is ramping up as the Ford factory expands.
The American carmaker is adding new battery and chassis lines to the plant, as well as an additional assembly line, in an effort to scale production of its EVs by a huge margin. Ford says it wants to be making 600,000 EVs per year by the end of 2023, and then 2 million by 2026. Right now, the Mustang EVs take 10 days to go from the start of assembly to the dealer lot, but that number could shrink as we get closer to 2026. The 2-million mark is the global production goal, of course, which includes EVs made overseas and those made in North America. The ramp up in production could help Ford keep it’s new place as the second highest-selling EV maker in the U.S., behind only Tesla.
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For now, these North American EVs will be the Ford Mustang Mach-e and the Ford F-150 Lightning, which is made at the Rouge Electric Vehicle Center in Dearborn, Michigan. Ford wants to reach a similar milestone with the F-150 Lightning pickup truck as that of the Mach-e; the company plans to be making 150,000 Lightning EVs per year by 2023.
The F-150 Lightning still has a way to go to catch up to the Mustang Mach-e, which went into production almost two years ago. Indeed, the debut of Ford’s electric crossover seems like it happened much more recently, but we’ll chalk that up to the global pandemic and the transitional state of the auto industry.
It could also be that the Mustang Mach-e still seems relatively rare to many. Or at least it seems that way to me, for whom sightings of the Mach-e are so rare that I still jump up and fix my gaze on the EV when I see one in the wild. I like the Mach-e; it’s a good alternative to the many Teslas that I see on Texas roads.
That novelty and popularity has caught Ford by surprise, too, according to the carmaker itself:
“When we put the pony on this Mustang, we knew we’d have skeptics. What we didn’t quite know then was just how popular this car would become,” said Darren Palmer, vice president, Electric Vehicle Programs, Ford Model e. “I love seeing Mustang Mach-E vehicles on the road and talking to customers, and I am seeing more and more of them.”
And the Mustang Mach-e’s steady growth is only going to get steadier and gain momentum now that Ford is releasing the electric car in 15 additional markets, including New Zealand, Brazil and Argentina. The EV will now be sold in 37 countries around the world, up from 22 during its first year of sales. That number of export countries could go higher still when Mach-e production gets further streamlined at Cuautitlán and elsewhere.
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