Ford Mustang is world’s best-selling sports car and coupe for sixth year in a row
The Ford Mustang is once again the world’s best-selling sports car and sports coupe, Ford announced Tuesday in a press release. Those claims are based on 2020 registration data from research firm IHS Markit.
According to that data, Ford sold 80,577 Mustang coupes globally last year, representing 15.1% of the global sports-coupe market, according to the automaker. That’s up from 14.8% a year earlier, and enough to give the Mustang the title of world’s best-selling sports coupe for the sixth straight year, Ford said.
The Mustang also claimed the best-selling sports car title for the second year in a row, according to Ford, but the automaker didn’t break out specific sales figures for that market segment.
Sales of Bullitt and Shelby performance models were also up 52.7% in 2020 from the previous year, Ford said, citing its own internal data. Ford is dropping the Bullitt, Shelby GT350, and Shelby GT350R for the 2021 model year, but adding the Mach 1 and keeping the Shelby GT500 model.
2019 Ford Mustang Bullitt first drive
As we reported in January, the Mustang was also the best-selling sports car in the U.S. for the sixth straight year with 61,090 sales. The United States remains the biggest global market for the Mustang, representing about two thirds of sales, according to Ford. Texas (8,600 sales), California (6,200 sales), and Florida (5,864 sales) were the top three states for Mustang sales in 2020, the automaker said. Overall sales figures were down 15.7% from 2019, however, due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Ford previously noted that the current-generation Mustang was engineered for global markets, and that strategy seems to be paying off. The automaker said its own data shows that sales in Hungary increased by 68.8% in 2020 compared to the previous year, with smaller sales increases in the Netherlands (38.5%), Denmark (12.5%), the Czech Republic (5.6%), and Austria (4%).
While definitely not a coupe, sales of the electric Mustang Mach-E have also been fairly robust. Ford said it moved 6,614 of the crossovers in the first quarter of 2021, with nearly 70% of customers coming from competitive brands. By late March, average dwell time on dealer lots was just seven days, according to Ford.
A redesigned Mustang is expected in 2022 as a 2023 model. It will also reportedly match the eight-year lifecycle of the current-generation Mustang, meaning it will stick around until about 2030.