Global electric vehicle bellwether Norway has a new market leader, with the new entry Ford Mustang Mach-E topping total car sales for May and taking an impressive 10% of the total national car market in its first full month of registrations.
According to data released on Tuesday by the Norwegian Road Federation, a total of 1,384 electric Ford Mustangs were registered in May, ahead of the Toyota RAV4 hybrid and the Skoda electric Enyaq. The Tesla Model 3 slipped to sixth place.
Norway’s is a key global market for electric vehicles, thanks to ambitious government policies to drive the uptake of zero emissions vehicles, including tax exemptions and a target to end the sale of petrol and diesel engines entirely by 2025.
In May, battery electric vehicles made up 60.4% of all new cars sold in Norway, up from 43.1% at the same time last year and in this context, the rapid rise in popularity of the new Ford – the US automaker’s first fully electric car – is an endorsement for the electric newcomer.
“Our realistic goal is to remain prominent in the sales statistics for several months to come,” Chief Executive Per Gunnar Berg of Ford Motor Norway said in a statement quoted on Reuters.
Ford officially launched the Mustang Mach E all electric in November of 2019, promising five variants with a top driving range of 300 miles (482km), acceleration up to 0-60 miles in under four seconds. Orders were opened for the northern hemisphere market in mid-2020.
Interestingly, sales of the Mach E were noted to have slumped in April in the US to a total of 1,951 units, raising the question of whether this dip in US numbers was correlated to the rise in sales in Europe.
According to InsideEVs, the difference between US sales in April and overall Mach-E production to that date was 12,395 and according to Ford, only some 3,800 units were in stock at US dealerships.
But Ford’s time at the top in Norway may be only fleeting, in keeping with past patterns of new models quickly becoming flavour of the month in the relatively mature market and then equally as quickly being muscled out by newer models.
For the month of November in 2020, VW’s ID.3 topped the sales list, as the share of plug in electric cars in Norway topped 75 per cent.
A year earlier, in October 2019, it was all about the Tesla Model 3, which accounted for one in five cars sold in Norway for the month and notched up a total of 2,342 sales.
Sophie is editor of One Step Off The Grid and deputy editor of its sister site, Renew Economy. Sophie has been writing about clean energy for more than a decade.