The Ford Mustang increased its share of the sports car market in 2020 and that makes it the sixth year in a row that the Mustang takes the cake as the best-selling sports car on earth.
According to data from IHS Markit, the Mustang makes up 15.1% of the overall sports car market, up from 14.8% in 2019.
“Mustang enthusiasts love their performance cars, and they showed that yet again,” said Hau Thai-Tang, Ford’s chief product platform, and operations officer. “In a challenging year for the entire auto industry because of the global pandemic, Mustang performed very well, increasing its share in the global sports car segment.”
As Thai-Tang suggested, although its claim of the global sports car market grew, 2020 was still a tough year even for the Mustang. Ford reported earlier this year that it sold a total of 61,090 Mustangs in the U.S. in 2020. In 2019, that number was 72,489, or 15% higher.
Read Also: Ford Mustang Outsells Chevrolet Camaro By Over 2:1
Those numbers matter because Americans bought up three-quarters of all Mustangs globally last year. Texas (8,600 sold), along with California (6,200) and Florida (5,864), were the top three American markets. Sales in several European countries, including Hungary, the Netherlands, and Denmark, did rose in 2020.
Last year was also a big year for special edition Mustangs, as sales of Shelby models and the Bullitt were up 52.7%. The departure of the movie-themed Mustang and the Shelby GT350 and GT350R may help explain why sales were so strong.
It’s all good news for Ford and fans of the Mustang, and leads us to wonder the great Confucian question of our time: Do so many Mustangs crash because people buy so many, or do people buy so many Mustangs because they crash so much? We may never know.
