Ford Kills the All-Electric F-150 as It Rethinks Its EV Ambitions

Ford is once it is again changing its plans to make electric vehicles, a response to a difficult year for powertrain technology that continues to make waves overseas but has seen domestic government support reduced and customer enthusiasm falter.

Instead of planning to make enough electric vehicles to account for 40% of global sales by 2030 — as it pledged just four years ago — Ford says it will focus on a broader range of hybrids, range-extended electric models and battery-electric models, which executives say will account for 50% of sales by the end of the decade. The automaker will make hybrid versions of almost every vehicle in its lineup, the company says.

The company will no longer make all-electric large trucks, Ford executives told reporters Monday, and will transition an electric vehicle factory in Tennessee to build gasoline-powered cars. Ford’s next-generation all-electric F-150 will instead be an extended-range electric vehicle, or EREV, a plug-in hybrid that uses an electric motor to power its wheels while a smaller gasoline engine recharges the battery. Ford says the technology, which automakers have touted in recent years as a compromise between battery-electric and gas-powered vehicles, will give its truck expanded towing capacity and a range of more than 700 miles.

Ford still plans to produce a mid-size electric pickup truck with a target starting price of around $30,000, which will be available in 2027. It will be the first of “affordable” electric vehicle models it is currently designing at a Skunkworks studio in California, which are expected to use a “universal” platform architecture that will make the vehicles cheaper to produce.

The new projects leave Ford with excess battery production capacity, which the company says it will use by opening an entirely new business: a secondary battery energy storage business. This new business will produce lower-cost, longer-life lithium iron phosphate, or LFP, batteries for customers in the utility or data center sectors.

“Ford follows the customer,” says Andrew Frick, president of Ford Blue and Ford Model e, the automaker’s gasoline and battery vehicle businesses. The adoption of electric vehicles by U.S. customers is not what the industry hoped for at the start of the decade, he says. (Battery electric vehicles currently account for about 7.5% of new car sales in the United States.) Frick also cited changes in the regulatory environment, including the Trump administration’s removal of commercial and consumer tax incentives for electric vehicles.

The company also canceled an all-electric commercial van planned for the European market. Instead, Ford will team up with Renault, in a partnership announced last week, to develop at least two small Ford-branded electric vehicles for Europe — a move that CEO Jim Farley called a “fight for our lives” as U.S. automakers try to compete with affordable electric vehicles from China.

Ford said Monday it also plans to produce a new gas-powered commercial van for North America.