An electric Ford truck is on display during the Electrify Expo DC in Washington, DC on July 23, 2023.
Nathan Howard | Getty Images
Ford engine expects to introduce a $30,000 all-electric vehicle that will be profitable in about two and a half years, CEO Jim Farley said Friday during the Aspen Ideas Festival.
Farley didn’t provide many other details about the vehicle, which is being developed by a “skunkworks” team at Ford, but said its main competitors are expected to be Chinese automakers BYD and an expected entry-level car from the U.S. electric vehicle leader Tesla.
Farley said Ford is initially focusing on smaller electric vehicles rather than larger all-electric trucks and SUVs, which have been gas-powered profit engines for the company in the past, because such vehicles will “never make money.”
“You have to make a radical change as a human being [automaker] to get to a profitable EV. “The first thing we need to do is really put all of our capital into smaller, more affordable electric vehicles,” Farley said in an interview with CNBC’s Julia Boorstin. “This is the work cycle that we have found now and that really works.” You will never make money with these big, huge electric vehicles. The battery costs $50,000. … The batteries will never be affordable.”
A Ford spokesman later clarified that Farley was referring to large vehicles like the company’s Super Duty models, or vehicles that require huge battery packs to achieve a significant 500-mile electric vehicle range. He wasn’t referring to vehicles like Ford’s current all-electric F-150 Lightning pickup truck or next-generation electric vehicles.
Ford announced earlier this year that it was delaying production of a large three-row SUV at a plant in Canada to 2027 from its original 2025 plan. Additionally, production of a next-generation pickup codenamed “T3” has been pushed back from late 2025 to 2026.
Farley reiterated Friday that Ford’s next-generation vehicles would be profitable.
He also said Americans need to “fall in love with small cars again” instead of larger ones, a surprising statement given that the majority of Ford’s profits come from trucks and considering that American automakers have had difficulty with small models in the past To earn money.
“We need to start falling in love with smaller vehicles again. This is super important for our society and for the adoption of electric vehicles,” Farley said Friday. “We’re just in love with these monster vehicles, and I love them too, but the weight is a big problem.”
Ford’s EV division lost $1.32 billion on 10,000 vehicles sold wholesale in the first quarter of this year. While the unit also includes EV-related businesses such as software, these losses represent a loss of $132,000 per vehicle sold.
Farley said it is critical for Ford to produce profitable electric vehicles over the next five years as Chinese automakers continue to expand globally.
“If we can’t make money on electric vehicles, we have competitors who have the largest market in the world, who are already dominant globally and are already building their supply chains around the world,” he said. “And if we don’t make profitable electric vehicles in the next five years, what does the future look like? We’ll just shrink to North America.”
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2024-06-28 21:30:54
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