The F-150 Lightning was sold as the vehicle of the future. But Ford Motor Company’s “iconic” electric vehicle pickup didn’t even live to see its fourth birthday. Earlier this week, Ford announced it would cease production of its flagship full-size electric truck, which first went into production in April 2022.
In a call with reporters, Andrew Frick, president of Ford Blue and Ford Model e, said that the company was responding to economic reality and consumer demand. “The American consumer is speaking clearly, and they want the benefits of electrification like instant torque and mobile power,” Frick told reporters. “But they also demand affordability … rather than spending billions more on large EVs that now have no path to profitability, we are allocating that money into higher-returning areas.”
The truth is, the Lightning was a money loser for Ford from the start.
A full two years ago, I was writing that Ford’s big bet on EVs was looking like a disaster, after the company announced it was slashing the price of the Lightning by $10,000. Ford claimed the move stemmed from lower-than-expected production costs, but that claim was as shaky as an EV range estimate on a cold Minnesota morning. After all, you don’t slash your production goals in half, as Ford had done in conjunction with slashing its price, because of lower production costs.
The truth wasn’t hard to see. Despite lucrative federal tax incentives, consumers were not adopting EVs as quickly as analysts had projected. Consumers had two big hangups about EVs: dependability and affordability. While you’ll find no shortage of articles online telling you that EVs are not just virtuous but cheap, they’re actually far more expensive than their gasoline-powered counterparts. Ashley Nunes, a senior research associate at Harvard Law School, told the BBC that an analysis of 13 years of U.S. vehicle prices shows inflation-adjusted EV prices rising rather than falling. The result is a persistent price gap, often between $15,000 and $20,000, that makes the choice between an electric vehicle and a gasoline-powered car an easy one for most buyers.
In other words, even with those $7,500 federal tax credits, EVs were, on average, far more expensive up front than gas-powered cars. And now those tax credits are largely gone.
And then there’s dependability. Even people who loved the EVs will tell you reliability is an issue. For example, last year, the New York Times profiled Michael Puglia, an anesthesiologist from Ann Arbor, Michigan, who raved about his latest purchase: a Ford F-150 Lightning electric pickup. While he loved the $80,000 truck, Puglia confessed he was thinking about selling it because he didn’t trust the vehicle’s range.
“People say ‘range anxiety’ — it’s like it’s the driver’s fault,” he said. “But it’s not our fault. It’s actually they’re not telling us what the real range is. The truck says it’s 300 miles. I don’t think I’ve ever gotten that.” Puglia is hardly alone. Surveys show that more than 70% report “feeling range anxiety at the idea of driving an EV.” Considering the bungled federal effort to roll out charging stations, this anxiety isn’t unjustified.
This doesn’t mean there’s no future for EVs, just that many misjudged the consumer appetite for electric vehicles. Ford, of course, deserves blame for continuing to invest billions of dollars in EVs even when it was incurring massive losses on every electric vehicle sold — a loss of nearly $5 billion on 116,000 EVs in 2023 alone.
Ford did not make these decisions in a vacuum, however. To some degree, the company was responding to policies emanating from Washington, D.C. It wasn’t just that lawmakers were using billions of taxpayer dollars to encourage Americans to buy EVs — dollars that could have been spent elsewhere. Even more heavy-handed methods were used.
When companies like Ford were racking up billions in losses on EVs, the Biden administration was rolling out emission targets designed to force Americans into the EV market and mandating that a majority of vehicle sales be hybrid or electric.
“Make no mistake,” The Wall Street Journal noted. “This is a coerced phase-out of gas-powered cars.” The message was clear. If not enough Americans were choosing to buy EVs, they’d be forced to, instead.
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Fortunately, this experiment in eco-authoritarianism appears to be over, hopefully never to return. While there are plenty of capable electric vehicles on the market, the hamfisted effort to push tens of millions of Americans into a technology they did not want — or could not afford — was economic madness. The approach echoed 20th-century collectivist industrial and agricultural schemes, where politics trumped consumer choice, market signals, and basic economic reality.
The F-150 Lightning may indeed be the vehicle of the future. But consumers, the actual masters of a free economy, have spoken: its time has not yet arrived.