#ford + #ev

Ford is ending production of the fully-electric F-150 Lightning as part of a broader companywide shakeup of its electric vehicle plans, the company announced Monday. In its place, Ford will sell what’s known as an “extended range electric vehicle” version of the truck, which adds a gas generator that can recharge the battery pack to power the motors for over 700 miles.

Ford revealed the F-150 Lightning in 2021, two years after it first announced plans for an all-electric Mustang, the Mach-E. Ford teased a $40,000 price tag for the Lightning, which was meant to be a flagship product for the company’s $22 billion push into electric vehicles. Like most large electric trucks, though, the F-150 Lightning struggled in the U.S. market. Part of that was because the $40,000 price tag never materialized for most buyers, as that base trim was targeted specifically at fleet customers. Ford wound up selling around 7,000 Lightnings per quarter over the last two years, with a peak of nearly 11,000 in the fourth quarter of 2024. EVs have faced a lot of headwind since the F-150 Lightning was first introduced. Tesla kicked off a dramatic price war to counter falling sales, which ate into legacy automakers’ thin (or negative) margins. The reelection of Donald Trump, along with Republicans taking control of Congress, has led to a reversal of many Biden-era policies meant to encourage the sale of electric vehicles.

Ford’s electric pickup has been America’s best-seller for quite some time, but digging deeper into the numbers reveals why Ford chose gas and hybrid trucks to bring in higher profits. The company sold 10,005 F-150 Lightning EVs in the third quarter, a healthy 39.7% increase year-over-year, but nowhere near the 207,732 F-Series trucks sold during the same period.

“For larger retail, electric utilities, the economics are unresolvable,” Farley said. “These customers have very demanding use cases for an electric vehicle. They tow, they go off-road, they take long road trips. These vehicles have worse aerodynamics and they're very heavy, which means very large and expensive batteries.”

A Ford spokesperson later clarified to InsideEVs that Farley was specifically referring to large, customer-focused "utility" vehicles—SUVs like the Ford Expedition and so on. Despite some setbacks and the cancellation of its large three-row SUV, Ford is far from done with EVs, however. The automaker is planning a midsize all-electric truck that is a kind of quasi-F-150 Lightning successor; a family of from-the-ground-up EVs on its so-called "skunkworks" platform; and a broadened series of electrified vehicles, including hybrids and extended-range electric vehicles (EREVs), which Farley elaborated on during the call.