About Four Percent Of Ford Buyers Qualify As Ultra-Wealthy

For quite some time now, a variety of studies have found that Ford buyers tend to have higher credit scores than customers of other brands – whether they’re mainstream or luxury entities, it seems. While credit scores aren’t necessarily sure signs of wealth, they are indicative of healthy financial decision making, and another recent study discovered that many Ford F-150 owners are at least moderately wealthy, too. Now, another new study has found that a decent percentage of Ford buyers, in general, qualify as far richer than most.

That data comes to us from S&P Global Mobility, which recently gathered information pertaining to the purchase behavior and demographic data of the top-tier U.S. households. S&P then combined this information with income data from the U.S. Census Bureau, vehicle registrations, and loyalty data of its own, which enabled the organization to categorize household incomes into tiers and take a deeper look at geographic levels – down to zip codes, in fact. It found that nine zip codes have an average household income of $500,000 or more, and there were 414 new vehicle registrations in those areas in the first half of 2024.

Interestingly, this study found that while many of these people own luxury vehicles, that wasn’t universally the case. In fact, Ford ranked as the seventh most-owned brand in these top-tier areas at 4.1 percent versus 9.3 percent for all households, in spite of income. That places The Blue Oval behind only Tesla (19.3 percent), BMW (9.9 percent), Mercedes-Benz (8.7 percent), Land Rover (5.8 percent), Toyota (4.6 percent), and Audi (4.6 percent) among the wealthier tier. Ultimately, luxury brands accounted for a significant 85 percent of all acquisitions, though mainstream models came in at 11 percent, and exotic vehicles were just 4 percent.

In terms of what types of vehicles the ultra-wealthy gravitate toward, well, 71.5 percent of registrations fall in the luxury space at the segment level, but three of the top ten are mainstream – including subcompact utility, compact utility, and mid-size utility. These three segments also happen to be the most popular across all income levels as well, which isn’t a huge surprise given Americans’ preference for crossovers and SUVs these days.