For the last two years, a small “skunkworks” at the Ford Motor Company has been working on a low-cost electric vehicle platform, according to Ford CEO Jim Farley. Farley revealed the existence of this new platform during the automaker’s quarterly financial results call with investors on Tuesday evening. The company is rethinking its electrification strategy, having now faced up to the reality that the current crop of EVs are too expensive for mass-market adoption to take off.
Ford was early to market with its Mustang Mach-E crossover, itself the product of a skunkworks-style development process: an internal group called Team Edison, formed to add some excitement to what was originally going to be a more boring compliance car. The team also took the bold step of making a fully electric version of the country’s bestselling vehicle, the F-150 pickup truck.
Demand for the electric F-150 Lightning appeared strong, but a series of price hikes has resulted in really expensive trucks languishing on dealer forecourts and Ford cutting production shifts to reduce output. The Mustang Mach-E is still selling, although with barely any growth year on year.
Ford also split its EV activities into a separate division, called Model e, which exposes just how much money this is all costing—a loss of $4.7 billion. That’s quite a lot more than the $3 billion it thought Model e would lose in 2023.
Farley said the company will develop smaller and cheaper EVs, although he did not announce any specific new models by name. “All of our EV teams are ruthlessly focused on cost and efficiency in our EV products because the ultimate competition is going to be the affordable Tesla and the Chinese OEMs,” he said.
“We made a bet in silence two years ago,” Farley said of Ford’s newest skunkworks. “They’ve developed a flexible platform that will not only deploy to several types of vehicles but will be a large install base for software and services,” he told investors.
Ford may scale back some of its battery factory ambitions, too. “One of the things we’re taking advantage of in taking some timing delays is rationalizing the level and timing of our battery capacity to match demand and actually reassessing the vertical integration that we’re relying on, and betting on new chemistries and capacities,” Farley said.
In 2023, Ford announced and then canceled a $3.5 billion plant to manufacture lithium iron phosphate battery packs in Michigan. But there are also three lithium-ion factories in the works in Kentucky and Tennessee.
Ford no longer expects Model e to be profitable by 2026, but Ford CFO John Lawler said that Model e would need to stop losing money “sooner or later.”
“EVs are here to stay, customer adoption is growing, and their long-term upside is central to Ford+,” said Lawler. “The customer insights we’re getting by being an early mover in electric pickups, SUVs, and commercial vehicles are invaluable—especially as we’re developing next-generation EVs that are going to surprise customers and be profitable within a year of launch.”
We badly need a ten thousand dollar car in the US. The price of a new automobile has gotten batshit insane and I look enviously overseas to places that can get cheap, modern Chinese EVs.
American automakers are doing the country a disservice by not following suit.
Or, dammit, let me buy a fucking Chinese car.
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They are cheaper than that in China right now. $7000 USD for a new electric car over there.
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It does matter because you can buy one already. People are buying them on Alibaba and stuff. I’m going to be driving one tomorrow
EDIT: I decided not to get one tomorrow. I found out they are made in China
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The cost of freighting it over is gonna double the price anyway
To bad you can’t legally drive them on public roads without north American safety regulation certification.
Yeah, they have to survive getting rammed into by someone’s M1 Abrams Raptor.
Goddamn I want a $7k new car that’s fucking awesome
How long do they last/how safe are they?
I’ve read that build quality on Chinese electric cars has gotten a lot better in the last couple of years.
Actually I’m less skeptical about the quality of manufacturing in China and more skeptical about the price point lol I wasn’t taking a dig at China specifically.
I just know I would be nervous getting behind the wheel of a $7000 electric car in 2024
Technically, Volvo’s EVs are Chinese electric cars, and they’ve got some of the best build quality out there because they learned a lot from Volvo about it.
Again, I am not taking a dig at China or its manufacturing. This is strictly about the price. Is this $7000 vehicle made by Volvo?
Not just the auto unions, but the military. The same sorts of things that go into cars go into a lot of military things beyond vehicles, and being able to build our own is a key strategic advantage and isn’t something they’re gonna lose.
You can barely find a good used ICE car for $10,000, so I don’t think that’s ever gonna happen.
But one of my many myriad problems with the current crop of EVs is that they won’t be under $10,000 on the used market in large numbers for a long time, since they’re starting at $30,000 and way, way up.
If we want to electrify the fleet of American cars - which also has many myriad problems - we need for normal folks to be able to buy and use them.
Even when you can buy them, they will need the battery replaced, which could be too expensive to buy anyway.
Which if Hyundai is anything to go by, they’ll try charging more than what a new car costs anyway.
You aren’t gonna get one with union labor in the u.s. and even if it was made by non union labor either the workers would be horribly underpaid and/or the quality would be lower.
It’s not right to compare prices between countries with vastly different price levels. Are u.s. farmers doing the country a disservice by not selling pork for $0.50 a pound? No we accept that we make more and that we should pay our fellow Americans more so they can have the same quality of life we do. Ideally this solidarity should extend internationally but we should at least preserve it in the U.S.
China needs a $10,000 vehicle because that’s all there middle class making $20,000 can afford. The u.s. doesn’t, plenty of middle class Americans are buying new $30,000 cars, they just aren’t buying electric ones, they’re getting huge SUVs and pickup trucks. What the u.s. needs is to disincentivize or even ban people from buying large gas cars that don’t need them.
Eventually if everyone’s forced to get evs the used stock will turn into evs too and you’ll get your $10,000 ev without destroying the American auto industry and millions of good paying union jobs.
That’s going to be a fun time deciding who does and doesn’t need them. And deciding who decides that. Ill skip that jury duty please
It wouldn’t be too hard if you take it from the starting point of you need to prove that you need it, and that could basically just be answering the following questions
Maybe add in another exception for large families but station wagons filled that niche fine before SUVs came in. Either way these are very discrete and definable definitions.
We even already have the framework set up, semi trucks require different licensing and registration so that some random person can’t just buy a vehicle that can easily kill a ton of people accidentally. The way trucks are headed that argument continues to get more applicable.
That’s called the “invisible hand of the free market.”
Some dude name Adam Smith wrote a book about it, a few years ago.
The average new car buyer in the US are a childless couple in their late 50s.
Overall demand in the US is still towards larger vehicles. Until we see a shift in that, we’re not going to get small vehicle focused demand, especially in a smaller sector like EVs currently are.
I think part of that can be attributed to the same thing as the demand for single family suburban homes though: the lack of availability of anything else.
My mom just replaced her almost 10 year old Highlander with a RAV-4, which is basically the same thing but smaller. Except, her new RAV-4 is the same size as her Highlander was, and the newer Highlanders are even bigger than that.
New Highlanders are just minivans for insecure people