is transportation editor with 10+ years of experience who covers EVs, public transportation, and aviation. His work has appeared in The New York Daily News and City & State.
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On Monday, Ford introduced an innovative new manufacturing process that it says will help make its EVs more sustainable, more desirable, and more importantly, more affordable. The timing couldn’t have been worse.
EV tax credits were set to expire at the end of September. President Trump’s trade war was tilting the balance in favor of China’s EVs. And automakers are beginning to delay and even cancel some planned models.
Ford seems to realize its timing is unfortunate. Throughout their announcement, the company’s top executives kept hammering one salient point: this was going to be really hard, success was far from guaranteed, and in fact they could even fail.
“Why do I say bet?,” said Ford CEO Jim Farley, dressed in a reflective yellow vest while surrounded by dozens of the company’s Louisville factory employees. “That’s an intentional word, because there are no guarantees with this project. We’re doing so many new things. I can’t tell you with 100 percent certainty that this will all go just right. It is a bet.”
Farley is right to hedge. As he correctly noted, “the automotive industry has a graveyard littered with affordable vehicles that were launched in our country with all good intentions.”
Ford President and CEO Jim Farley Getty Images
Affordable EVs, in particular, are incredibly difficult to build in the US. American buyers have become used to a certain of hugeness. We like our trucks big, our range limitless, and our cargo capacity herculean. And a truly affordable EV, one priced somewhere in the $25,000-$30,000 range, would likely need to be smaller, slower, and less capable by definition than most of the two- and three-row SUVs currently dominating the EV market.
We saw a little bit of this with Slate Auto’s truck, which claims to reach its “mid-twenties” starting price by stripping out features most people have come to expect in a new vehicle, things like a touchscreen, a cellular connection, a working stereo, and exterior paint options.
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