Dearborn — Like an airplane graveyard, Henry Ford II World Center’s parking lot now serves as a storage facility for new Ford vehicles yet to move on to dealerships across the nation. Rows and rows of vehicles, including the first full-size EV pickup truck, the F-150 Lightning, sit in cold silence in the December air.
Understanding the actions of Ford Motor Co. over the past half decade is like watching Christopher Nolan’s “Tenet”: interesting, but utterly unintelligible. But a recent shift suggests the Dearborn-based automaker has finally found the plot.
That’s all good right? Well, not exactly. Ford took an estimated $13 billion loss on electric vehicles over the past three years and is taking an additional $19.5 billion hit to scale down their aggressive EV push, which was meant to please the regulatory and climate apparatchiks of the previous presidential administration.
That’s a hell of a lot of money to set on fire for luxury political beliefs.
The obvious problem was apparent to anyone with even a room temperature IQ: Nobody was buying EV’s. Well, that’s not entirely true. A few people were buying them, even with tax subsidies attached, but the fact remains: Ford was losing tens of billions of dollars chasing a very small piece of the domestic market.
It’s pretty clear Americans don’t want to drive electric vehicles, but the failure of Ford’s EV ambitions isn’t monocausal. The nation is enduring an affordability crisis from Covid-era inflation, and given that electric vehicles that on average cost $10,000 more than gas-powered vehicles, they’re a hard sell for the average American.
The all-electric F-150 Lightning could not be sold at its originally promised price, as acknowledged by Ford when it rolled off the line, thus the first full-size electric truck was immediately out of reach for working class Americans who *gasp* are the people who like to buy pick-up trucks. The Lightning was cursed from day one with a battery unable to pull heavy trailers for distance and limited range in cold weather.
Ford went all-in seeking to be the first to mainstream an all-electric big truck, anticipating a continued frowning on fossil fuels in future administrations.
That didn’t happen, and Ford is scrambling to wind down its long-term bet, but that course correction doesn’t obfuscate the other bewildering expenditures they’ve made over the last several years during which their stock price has been in the gutter.
The construction of the new headquarters on the grounds of their research and development campus in Dearborn is coming in at an estimated cost of $1.2 billion. The expansion of such massive facility is really a consolidation of their more than 30,000 workers into one building as Ford seeks to entice tech and engineering workers back into the office.
Ford is storing the EV inventory that they can’t sell on the parking lots of the old headquarters at 1 American Road. A long-term plan for that property has yet to be unveiled. The building emptied during Covid and few wanted to go back.
While Ford built its new headquarters, it also spent $1 billion remodeling Michigan Central Station, saving the long-abandoned Detroit landmark and remediating its classic Beaux-Art architecture. But to what end? The building is certainly beautiful to look at, but is it being used? Sources claim Ford does have employees working in the building, but most of the floors look ostensibly empty.
From the outside looking in it appears Ford spent an astronomical amount of money on optics and clean-energy aesthetics while enjoying only a 13% domestic market share. How does that instill shareholder confidence?
Ford does have an interesting and unique work-around that keeps them chugging along despite the missteps. The company pays incredibly high and attractive dividends—around 5%—on regular and stable payouts, appealing to investors. Ford’s low valuation and focus on returning cash to stockholders has resulted in most investors immediately reinvesting their returns.
“Rarely do Ford investors pull out and walk away with their money,” according to portfolio manager at Wells Fargo. “They typically ride the long-term gains and keep buying back in.”
Ford Motor isn’t completely killing all their EVs. Rather, they appear focused on chasing other automakers in the hybrid market, and that seems a wise move at this juncture given the current landscape.
The Ford Lightnings sitting over at the former World Center? Those vehicles will, at some point, find buyers, but most likely not in the Midwest, and certainly not in Michigan, according to a Ford sales manager speaking off the record.
“Those trucks will be shipped to California where EV’s are status symbol and combustion engines are heavily regulated,” he said. “They’ll eventually offload all of them at a loss, and people out there actually like to buy those things.”
Ford writing down their EV line has upset the clean-energy advocates and incensed many progressive Americans. A Northville resident lamented the gloating: “It’s win for the anti-intelligence movement.”
But a salesman at Bill Brown Ford in Livonia said with unflinching honesty: “The Lightning? We couldn’t give those f—ing things away.”
Let’s toast to Ford finally refocusing on their real customer in the new year: the average American worker.
Jay Murray is a writer for Michigan Enjoyer and has been a Metro Detroit-based professional investigator for 22 years. Follow him on X @Stainless31.
