Ford Hybrid Sales Growth

Aside from the Chevy Volt, a plug-in hybrid, the car companies formerly known as the Big Three—GM, Ford, and Chrysler—have largely been spectators in the hybrid and plug-in vehicle category.

But there was a new contender on the scene: Ford, which sold 3,625 Fusion hybrids in April—more than four times the number it sold in April 2012. And it sold 3,197 of the C-Max Hybrid, a crossover model that didn’t exist last year. In all, Ford accounted for 6,822 of 42,804 hybrids sold in April—about 16 percent of the total.

It’s one thing to get an existing Ford owner to trade in her five-year-old Escape for a new one. It’s quite another thing to attract a former Prius owner to choose a Fusion hybrid as her next car. And that’s what these new vehicles are doing. I drove the C-Max Energi hybrid in April—it’s got all the techno-wizardry that Prius owners will recognize—a dashboard laden with data and digital green leafs that grow as you drive in a fuel-efficient manner.

Ford has engineered a remarkable turnaround in the last several years. Alone among the U.S.-based carmakers, it avoided bankruptcy, restructured its business, and weathered the deep recession in comparatively good health. That wasn’t enough to make its products cool in lucrative markets like Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. But the hybrids are.

In effect, the hybrids and plug-ins are allowing Ford to gain new customers in new geographic areas, and to take market share from competitors. Overall, sales of Ford brand vehicles were up 17.8 percent in April 2013 from April 2012. By contrast, Toyota’s sales in the U.S. fell 1.1 percent between April 2012 and April 2012. “We’re turning, conquesting and growing our sales the fastest in the largest hybrid markets in the country,” Ford spokesman Erich Merkle told Bloomberg News last week.

-Courtesy of The Daily Beast