Ford CEO: I Would've Done The F-150 Lightning Differently
Ford made, to put it lightly, a misstep on EVs. In his five years at the company, CEO Jim Farley is willing to acknowledge that. How can he not, with a $19.5 billion write-down largely as a result of changes in EV plans, the dissolution of battery plant agreements with suppliers, and the death of the fully-electric F-150 Lightning? On that last point, Ford's CEO told Car and Driver he felt the brand could've approached the truck "differently."
F-150 Lightning demand spiked during the pandemic and the subsequent semiconductor shortage. Ford, at the time, was happy to expand production. Things didn't go as planned, though, and demand soon fell back off. "I totally would've done it differently. I mean, look, we didn't know what we didn't know," says Farley. "COVID totally was a false signal. Post-COVID, and during the chip crisis that was a result of it, there was such high demand for all vehicles."
Farley says that at the time, if you could build a car, you could sell it for basically "30 or 40 percent higher prices than before COVID." That comment may go a long way to explaining why so many Americans feel they can't afford a car. Regardless, Ford says that there was a "prejudice" towards gas cars at the brand, and that they hadn't designed "the [electric] cars right." People loved them, asserts Farley, but they wouldn't fork over the cash.
When asked when he knew they'd done EVs wrong, Farley had a moment in mind: "When we ripped apart a Tesla with Doug Field [Ford's chief officer for EVs]." Farley said he was "flabbergasted." "The Mach-E's wiring harness was 70 pounds heavier and 1.6 kilometers longer."
Ford called the start of all-electric F-150 Lightning production a "Model T moment for the 21st Century." By the end of 2025, the model was dead. Mostly. Now, Ford says that a kind of hybrid, a range-extended electric vehicle (EREV), is right for the Lightning name. The truck will still be powered exclusively by electric motors, but will also pack a gasoline engine under the hood to act as a generator, burning fossil fuels to charge the battery pack under the floor when a charger isn't readily available.
Ford says it has another one of those "Model T moments" coming in 2027 with the debut of its latest EV platform, which will form the bones of a new electric midsize truck. Does this "Model T moment" have the makings of the last? Ford is one for three on those, but the brand and the man at the helm do seem to have learned something in the last half a decade.