{"id":19319,"date":"2025-12-18T18:59:39","date_gmt":"2025-12-18T18:59:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/2025\/12\/18\/why-fords-electric-f-150-never-took-off\/"},"modified":"2025-12-18T18:59:40","modified_gmt":"2025-12-18T18:59:40","slug":"why-fords-electric-f-150-never-took-off","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/2025\/12\/18\/why-fords-electric-f-150-never-took-off\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Ford\u2019s Electric F-150 Never Took Off"},"content":{"rendered":"
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After years of bold EV promises, Ford is retreating from the F-150 Lightning and rewriting its electric future. Josh Lefkowitz\/Getty Images<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This week, Ford<\/a> announced it will end production of the F-150 Lightning, the electric version of its best-selling pickup truck, and take a $19.5 billion write-down tied to its current and planned EV programs. The move marks a sharp reversal from commitments Ford made eight years ago to transition toward an all-electric future. Since 2023, the company\u2019s EV business has lost more than $13 billion.<\/a> The F-150 Lightning\u00a0was designed to bridge Ford\u2019s core truck buyers to electric vehicles. Instead, a combination of policy headwinds, overestimated demand, rising costs and weak marketing undermined the program.<\/p>\n

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At its launch in 2022, Ford promoted the Lightning with a video showing a prototype pulling a one-million-pound train<\/a>. In practice, the truck is rated to tow up to 10,000 pounds when properly equipped, but doing so cuts its range roughly in half, from about 320 miles to 160 miles. The commercial \u201craised expectations of what they could do, and when people realized how much range is impacted by towing a large trailer, they were really disappointed,\u201d Sam Abuelsamid, an automotive analyst and Vice President of Market Research at Telemetry, told Observer.<\/span><\/p>\n

Abuelsamid noted that gasoline-powered trucks face similar range penalties while towing. \u201cThe Lightning is actually better than the gas version of the F-150 in pretty much every other way.\u201d<\/p>\n

Still, sales never matched Ford\u2019s ambitions. The automaker had expected to sell 40,000 to 150,000 units a year,<\/a> but even at its peak in 2024, it sold just 33,5100 units. By contrast, the gas-powered F-150 continues to sell hundreds of thousands of units annually.<\/p>\n

Anticipating high demand initially,\u00a0Ford relied heavily on components shared with other vehicles in its lineup to scale production quickly, which drove up costs and made the Lightning less efficient to build.<\/p>\n

\u201cInstead of ramping up capacity in short order, they should have invested in optimizing systems, which would have also benefited other electric Ford products like the Mach-E and e-Transit,\u201d Abuelsamid said. \u201cWith so much underutilized capacity, the fixed costs were way higher than they should have been, which led to a lot of the losses.\u201d<\/p>\n

Timing also worked against the Lightning. When the electric truck debuted in 2022, Russia had just invaded Ukraine, disrupting supplies of nickel, a key material in EV batteries. Prices surged, and Ford passed those higher costs on to customers, raising prices and further dampening demand.<\/p>\n

Ford pivots to hybrid and A.I. data centers<\/b><\/h3>\n

Ford is now trying to recoup parts of its electrification investment by introducing a hybrid version of F-150 and shift some battery production toward A.I. data centers.<\/p>\n

Ford is promoting an extended-range electric vehicle, or EREV, which uses a gasoline engine to generate electricity for the battery. EREVs aim to ease concerns about charging time and range, but Ford hasn\u2019t offered a timeline for an EREV F-150.<\/p>\n

The company is also repurposing some of its EV battery plants into battery systems for data centers, a shift other battery makers have already made. LG Energy Solution took a similar approach at its Holland, Mich., plant, which was originally slated to produce nickel manganese cobalt (NMC) cells for electric vehicles. After acquiring GM\u2019s stake in a joint-venture facility in Lansing, Mich., LG retooled the Holland plant to produce lithium iron phosphate (LIP) cells for grid storage and data centers.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe data center bet, in general, is not a bad idea. Ford has a battery factory, and there is an absolutely huge demand for energy storage systems from data centers,\u201d Abuelsamid said. \u201cThe difference\u2026is in timing.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

For Ford, the transition carries risk. \u201cFord has a plant configured for producing NMC pouch cells that they now have to retool for LFP prismatic cells,\u201d Abuelsamid added. \u201cThe revised equipment will probably be coming from China. That means they won\u2019t be producing again until sometime in 2027 at the earliest, paying huge tariffs on the new equipment and risking the data center bubble bursting before then.\u201d<\/p>\n

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