DETROIT — Ford Motor kept its position as the No. 3 seller of vehicles in the United States during the third quarter, holding off Hyundai Motor by a slim margin despite forecasts that the South Korean automaker would move ahead of it.
Ford said Friday that its third-quarter light-duty sales fell 6.6% from a year earlier to 507,395 vehicles. The total leaves out the company’s largest heavy-duty trucks, which fall under a different classification.
Hyundai, counting its Hyundai, Kia and Genesis brands together, posted a 5.4% increase to 506,200 vehicles for the quarter.
Both automakers beat expectations. Cox Automotive had projected in a forecast last week that Hyundai would outsell Ford on a quarterly basis for the first time.
Hyundai has made significant gains in the U.S. market this year. Ford, by contrast, has dealt with production problems on its key F-Series pickups following two supplier fires last year that interrupted both output and sales.
Through the third quarter, Ford’s lead over Hyundai for the year stands at about 89,700 units, based on figures the companies reported this week.
General Motors is the top U.S. seller for 2026, with Toyota Motor behind it. The Japanese automaker has been narrowing the gap with GM this year.
Ford on Friday played down how close Hyundai has come in sales, pointing out that the Kia and Hyundai brands are run separately in the U.S. even though they share a corporate parent.
Along with the F-Series production setbacks, Ford has faced difficult year-over-year comparisons because of models it has discontinued, including the Ford Escape.
Rob Kaffl, Ford’s head of U.S. sales, said Friday that sales and inventories of F-Series pickups, the F-150 among them, kept improving over the quarter.
“Some of the headwinds we had early in the year are kind of behind us, and it’s really setting us up for a really strong Q4 as we move in,” Kaffl said on a media call.
F-Series sales slipped just 1.9% in the third quarter, a figure that includes a 97.1% drop for the discontinued F-150 Lightning electric pickup.
The Ford brand was down about 6% for the quarter, while the luxury Lincoln brand fell 18%.
Ford’s electric vehicle sales were down 67.5% through September, with a decline of roughly 80% in the third quarter alone. The automaker also faces hard comparisons in that segment after reporting record EV sales in the same period a year earlier, when demand surged before the Trump administration ended federal incentives worth as much as $7,500 for consumers buying an EV.
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