By Tim Higgins
Another Tesla killer bites the dust.
The all-electric version of the Ford F-150 pickup joins a long list of rivals that were touted as real threats to Elon Musk's hold on the U.S. EV market.
But so far, the Motor City has failed to capture the magic that has made the Model Y sport-utility vehicle the bestselling car in the world -- electric or not.
Ford Motor's announcement this past week that it was ending this generation of the money-losing F-150 Lightning (along with refocusing its EV strategy) and taking a $19.5 billion hit wasn't just a huge blow to Chief Executive Jim Farley. It was another blow, one of several this year, to the idea of an electric-car future in the U.S. Instead, it increasingly looks like China has a commanding lead after fully embracing Musk's vision of the electrified automobile.
Ford's move was cheered on by those seeing it as proof that when the government cuts incentives and rules aimed at helping EVs, as the Trump administration has done, customers will vote with their wallets against green technology.
The real issue this past week, however, might be simpler: Ford's EV truck failed to live up to customers' expectations.
That would have been hard to imagine in May 2021, when Farley and his team from Dearborn, Mich., revealed the much-hyped truck in a Tesla-like presentation.
"It's like no pickup truck I have ever driven," Farley said on stage at the time. "It hauls ass and tows like a beast. Metaphorically, it might as well have a Superman cape and a Captain America shield."
That kind of no-compromise approach helped make Tesla successful. In its early days, Musk, as chief executive, often said he was going to offer the world's best car that just happened to be electric. For many, when the Model S sedan began deliveries in 2012, it was just that -- a vehicle that outperformed luxury cars and had enviable range. Subsequent offerings, the Model 3 sedan and its sister, the Model Y, were essentially more-affordable versions of the Model S.
Just as Musk had excited customers and investors with his vision for what an electric car could be, Farley was impressing others with his vision for an electric pickup. The goal: make something worthy of being branded as an F-Series, which has been the bestselling truck in the U.S. for almost 50 years.
Soon, $100 reservations for the new truck started pouring in -- so many, in fact, that by December 2021, Farley announced that Ford wasn't taking any more of them. He was racing to roughly triple the original planned capacity of trucks to 150,000 annually to meet expected demand.
Investors applauded Ford's moves. During an appearance on CNBC, Farley was pressed on how Tesla's market value far eclipsed Ford's valuation. "The only way we're going to change that is we have to scale our electric business so that we are competitive with them on scale or beat them in more profitable segments, like pickup trucks and commercial vans, " he said. "We have to...get to a million units as quickly as we can in the next couple of years, and we have to make money, more money than we make on our" gas vehicles.
And if it wasn't clear, Farley noted, "My name is on the line."
He had reason to be confident. Reviews of the truck would be glowing. MotorTrend dubbed it the Truck of the Year, while it won the coveted North American Truck of the Year award. Then the damndest thing happened in showrooms: People began shopping, and the Ford EV wasn't what they expected.
Yes, it had sports-car acceleration, as promised. Its towing capacity was impressive, too.
Yet a complaint took root when the simple math became obvious -- the trade-off between the weight of the vehicle and the range of the expensive batteries powering it. Not surprisingly, customers saw the distance they could go between charges decrease dramatically when they towed heavy loads, such as boats or RVs.
Almost 35% of Ford's EV truck buyers were previously owners of a traditionally powered pickup, according to surveys of new-car buyers conducted by the researcher Strategic Vision. Buyers had certain expectations for what a truck could do and reported dissatisfaction with the Lightning's towing and off-road capabilities.
"Traditional Ford F-150 truck buyers are among the most truckiest of all truck people, and while the Ford F-150 Lightning, in my opinion, was a fantastic vehicle, it was not a fantastic vehicle for people who needed it to behave like a Ford F-150 truck all by itself," Alexander Edwards, president of Strategic Vision, told me. "Instead, it is a truck for your Tesla Model S owner who might need to do a couple things here and there."
Ford would say that its electric truck attracted a new audience to the brand -- it noted that almost 75% of its buyers came from non-Ford brands and very few came from an F-150. Still, the Lightning seemed to be judged on a truck curve -- made all the more frustrating when considering the vehicle had an average transaction price higher than the nonelectric version (18% more last year, according to Edmunds, which tracks new-car sales).
In other words, the Lightning wasn't the best truck that happened to be electric. It was, at most, the best truck that was electric -- which is a much smaller niche.
Ford's Lightning sales would never come close to 150,000 annually. (Through the first nine months of this year, sales in the U.S. were up 1% at 23,000 trucks -- far ahead of rival EV trucks from Tesla, General Motors and Rivian Automotive.)
Despite the Lightning's bona fides, customer satisfaction scores collected by Strategic Vision were much higher for Rivian, an EV startup pulling a smaller share of previous truck owners to its offering. Its buyers had far different expectations for what a truck could do and, for example, weren't put off with having to recharge after towing a boat to the lake. They just thought it was cool that their electric vehicle could tow a boat.
The expectations game is a tricky one. Unless U.S. automakers figure it out, their electric dreams will go nowhere.
Write to Tim Higgins at tim.higgins@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
December 21, 2025 05:30 ET (10:30 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2025 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
Comments