What’s the only thing sadder than a car company giving up on all-electric vehicles in 2025? Try Ford’s new all-electric pickup, powered by a gas generator on the side.
According to TechCrunch, that’s exactly the direction Ford has decided to go with its next-generation of pickup trucks. On Monday, the company announced it had ended production of the all-electric F-150 Lightning, which it hailed as the “best selling electric pickup truck in the US” as recently as November.
In its place, Ford is rolling out an “extended range electric vehicle” version of the F-150 Lightning — complete with a gas generator that can add 700 miles of charge to the truck’s battery, TC reports. It’s not known when the EREV will go on sale.
In its announcement, Ford said it will report $19.5 billion in expenses related to the changeover, in order to update vehicle and battery factories.
All told, it sounds like a pretty robust retreat from electrification. On top of the all-electric F-150 Lightning, the automotive giant will also be scrapping plans for its T3, a top-down redesign of an all-electric truck, as well as a “next-generation commercial van,” TC confirmed.
“Rather than spending billions more on large EVs that now have no path to profitability, we are allocating that money into higher returning areas, more trucks and van hybrids, extended range electric vehicles, affordable EVs and entirely new opportunities like energy storage,” Ford president Andrew Frick told reporters.
Though the solution is beyond parody — an EV with a gas generator on the side sort of defeats the whole purpose of the thing — Frick’s point is fair enough.
When it debuted the Lightning, Ford promised it would start at a cost of $40,000, a commitment that Tesla’s Cybertruck tried to match. In reality, according to InsideEVs, consumers rarely saw those price tags, which were meant for enterprise customers buying fleets of vehicles in bulk. Instead, the cost for most electric trucks runs closer to $60,000 — a tough sell in this economy, to put it softly.
That’s in spite of a sizable potential market who are shut out by the truck’s pricing. As Brent Gruber, EV lead at research firm JD Power told InsideEVs, some 70 percent of consumers who consider buying a Ford Lightning have a household income of $100,000 or less.
“So it’s a high percentage of people who are interested in that product but aren’t necessarily following through to the purchase process, likely in part, due to the cost of that product,” Gruber said, adding that it “really resonated with consumers, but probably fell short from a cost perspective.”
Where we go from here is anyone’s guess. Unless the harebrained Lightning EREV is substantially more cost-effective from a purchaser standpoint, it’s unlikely to solve Ford’s longstanding problem of affordability — though it may buy them some breathing room while they figure out what led them to this point in the first place.
More on EVs: Elon Musk Is Making Cybertruck Sales Look Better by Selling a Huge Number to Himself
The post Ford Gives Up, Adds Gas Generator to Its Electric Pickup Truck appeared first on Futurism.
