Ford boss Jim Farley insists that the firm isn’t moving away from electric vehicles, despite making a massive £14.5 billion write-down after scrapping much of its future EV plans.
The huge investment cut announced last month was in response to slowing consumer demand for EVs in the US, along with the scrapping of EV incentives and emission mandates by US president Donald Trump.
Ford has also axed the F-150 Lightning, the EV version of its perennially best-selling US model. Although the F-150 Lightning has proven to be the most popular electric pick-up in North America, Ford sold only around 27,000 of the EV model last year, compared with around 700,000 of the petrol F-150.
Despite that, Farley said: “We’re not going backwards on EVs.” Speaking at the Detroit Auto Show, he added: “We’re actually accelerating the amount of EVs we’re bringing to market. We’re just going to do less than we had originally planned. That’s why we had to do the write-down.”
Farley said Ford is focused on offering greater powertrain choice for consumers, with different options based on the type of use case for each vehicle. Ford is developing three electrified platforms, including the critical new Universal EV (UEV) architecture that will be used for a range of models, starting with a sub-$30,000 (£22,000) EV.
Farley said the first affordable EV on the UEV platform “is, to me, a Model T moment”. He added: “This is us going back to our roots, innovating the development, manufacturing and supply chain. It’s really a challenger project, and we’re deep into execution now.
“I am more proud of that vehicle than almost any vehicle I’ve worked in my career. As Wolfgang Puck said, a lot of people could run a four- or five-star restaurant; not many people can do a good buffet in Las Vegas.”
Farley insisted that, despite the write-down, Ford has a “full plan” for electric models. He said: “UEV is a full plan that we’ll build in Louisville – 300,000 units. We were number two to Tesla [in EV sales] for many years, and we’re accelerating our pure EVs with UEV, but we’re focusing it on the most affordable EV.
“Where we’re really accelerating our investment is EREVs [extended-range electric vehicles] and hybrids. We’ve been really successful with the F-150 hybrid and now we want to go across the range with hybrid and EREVs.
“We’re really focused on choice for customers, expanding across our whole line based on duty cycle. We learned so much being an early mover in EVs and a full-line manufacturer. We learned a lot about where we need to put our capital.”
The UEV platform is a zonal architecture built on new software and will be highly flexible thanks to the use of megacasting to manufacture entire sections of cars as single units. It has also been designed to offer level-three autonomy – meaning hands-off driving on certain highways – on all vehicles.
Ford is also developing a new electric architecture for its multi-energy vehicles, along with a third electrified platform.
Key to all those platforms will be lowering production costs to increase profit margins.
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