Ford is once again shifting its electric vehicle manufacturing plans, a response to a year that’s been tough for the powertrain technology that’s still making waves overseas but has seen domestic government support cut and customer enthusiasm weaken.
Instead of planning to make enough electric vehicles to account for 40 percent of global sales by 2030—as it pledged just four years ago—Ford says it will focus on a broader range of hybrids, extended-range electrics, and battery-electric models, which executives now say will account for 50 percent of sales by the end of the decade. The automaker will make hybrid versions of almost every vehicle in its lineup, the company says.
The company will no longer make a large all-electric truck, Ford executives told reporters Monday, and will repurpose an electric vehicle plant in Tennessee to build gas-powered cars. The next generation of Ford’s all-electric F-150 Lighting will instead be an extended-range electric vehicle, or EREV, a plug-in hybrid that uses an electric motor to power its wheels while a smaller gasoline engine recharges the battery. Ford says the tech, which automakers have touted in recent years as a middle-ground between battery-electric vehicles and gas-powered ones, will give its truck extended towing capacity and a range of over 700 miles.
Ford still plans to produce a midsize electric pickup truck with a target starting price of about $30,000, to be available in 2027. That will be the first of the “affordable” electric vehicle models it’s currently designing at a skunkworks studio in California, which are slated to use a “universal” platform architecture that will make the vehicles cheaper to produce.
The new plans leave Ford with a bunch of excess battery-making capacity, which the company says it will use by opening a whole new business: a battery energy-storage sideline. This new business will produce lower-cost and longer-living lithium iron phosphate, or LFP, batteries for customers in the public utility or data center industries.
“Ford is following the customer,” says Andrew Frick, the president of Ford Blue and Ford Model e, the automaker’s gas- and battery-powered vehicle businesses. US customer adoption of electric vehicles is not where the industry expected at decade’s start, he says. (Battery-electric vehicles currently make up about 7.5 percent of US new car sales.) Frick also cited changes in the regulatory environment, including the Trump administration's rollback of commercial and consumer tax incentives for electric vehicles.
The company has also canceled an all-electric commercial van planned for the European market. Instead, Ford will team up with Renault, in a partnership announced last week, to develop at least two small Ford-branded electric vehicles for Europe—a move that CEO Jim Farley called part of a “fight for our lives,” as US automakers try to compete with affordable EVs out of China.
Ford said Monday that it also plans to produce a new gas-powered commercial van for North America.