- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
Auto giant Ford reported its worst quarterly earnings in four years on Tuesday, and a net loss of $8.2 billion for 2025, the largest yet since the 2008 recession.
At least some of that is due to the $4.8 billion that the company’s electric vehicle division lost in 2025.
The outlook is still looking bleak. Company executives said they expect to lose $4-4.5 billion more in 2026, and no expectation to breakeven until around 2029.
You must log in or # to comment.
Well perhaps if they sold usable EVs, instead of an overpriced truck and an overpriced SUV/sports car hybrid they might have better sales. Otherwise it’s just pissing in your lemonade and then complaining that no one comes to your stand.
yeah i’ve been dreaming of a full bed electric for 10 years, but they just kept making these urban cowboy bullshits.
they coulda done so good going after the municipal and county fleet markets, but no, just frufru 4 door pickups.
Self-own. They helped elect the president who revoked the EV tax credit.
I think the customer has spoken.
Yeah, and they said: we don’t want EVs that cost $70K+. I swear to god, if just ONE fucking car company had released a single, fucking electric pickup truck about the size and price of the Ford Maverick (or even a little smaller), a lot of people would have bought it.
Instead, Tesla released the six figure monstrosity that was the Cybertruck, Chevy released the 10,000 pound, $90,000 Silverado EV (and the even more expensive GMC Sierra EV), and Ford released the Lightning, which was large without the towing capacity and still cost $70K to $80K.
I’m loving the EV Maverick idea.
I’m semi-interested in what Slate is doing but highly unenthused by its financial backer
Very late to market with a very small range of very overpriced models that aren’t very good and no one wants to buy. Gee, Ford Motor Company (who famously made your money early on by quickly producing cheap mass produced popular models before everyone else), I wonder why this new approach didn’t work out for you?
If you weren’t trying so hard to prove that it couldn’t work, maybe it could’ve worked for you.
They didnt know how to build an EV profitably, its not that they magically could have made something cheaper and better.
Its not as simple as just throw a battery in it an voila.
GM, Ford, Stellantis are all struggling with how to do it profitably.
People liked the Bolt and its pricing, but it wasn’t profitable.
The commonality between those manufacturers is their nationality, the extent to which they dismissed EVs as a silly fad that would never work, their willingness to oppose EV subsidies and their delay to market because of their refusal to commit to the technology early.
Other, mainly overseas brands went earlier, made better EVs that are fun to drive, got to market when the subsidies were still large, became popular, are on their third or fourth iteration of their models, have a diverse range of EVs, and are profiting from their EV range.
It’s not like no one in the industry knows how manufacturing works or how markets develop over time, and it’s absolutely untrue that EVs are complicated compared to Internal Combustion Engine vehicles. They’re not. They’re really not. It really is as simple as a big battery with a bit of temperature management, couple of electric motors (breathtakingly simple, very old technology), recharge the 12V battery for all your regular car electronics for which you reuse all your existing parts, and now you have an electric car.
Yes it’s more expensive, and no, you can’t run your profit margins as big unless you make your own batteries, and that’s why they hated them, but it was stupid of them to think that Nokia’s response to smartphones is the way to deal with a technology that’s catching on, right when many of the western democracies were loudly taking about banning legacy vehicles.
It really is the Nokia tactic. They were choosing to focus 100% on the legacy tech where they already had decent market share.
It really is as simple as a big battery with a bit of temperature management, couple of electric motors (breathtakingly simple, very old technology), recharge the 12V battery for all your regular car electronics for which you reuse all your existing parts, and now you have an electric car.
Lol dude.
If you want to have a shitty ass car sure.
Its a whole new way of thinking about heating and cooling the battery which has to be a car wide system, otherwise you waste so much heat and end up having an inefficient car that needs more batteries, which adds more weight which lowers range which makes it harder to sell.
And ignoring the HV battery and doing everything off the 12v is also a waste, they all redesign the electrical system to work off the HV battery through an inverter. Some is still off of the 12v battery but its not optimized if you
do thatonly using the 12v.Then you gotta totally rethink aerodynamics because every bit counts towards getting good efficiency, otherwise you’re once again adding more batteries which further increases cost while lowering efficiency.
Same for motors, ya, we have motors, but efficient motors for cars, wasn’t a thing. All the EV companies are iterating heavily on making a super efficient motor and for the first few iterations, they weren’t as efficient as they could be, meaning more batteries, so more weight more expensive less efficient. Rare earth magnets for permanent magnet motors aren’t cheap, and there are trade offs to not using them in motors, to the point where some use a mix of different types of motors, which again is a complicated process to work through.
Then they gotta do the whole HV charging architecture which has led to multiple recalls across many brands. We have Hyundai with controller problems for years now.
We have cars being recalled due to fire risk not from the cells themselves which would be the OEM like LGs fault, but from bad battery architecture as well which is the car manufacturers fault.
We have cars like the mustang mach e originally overheating and being throttled.
We have early tries like Nisan with air cooling on the leaf which lead to batteries going bad early.
The list goes on and on, its not simple, or easy to make profitable.
Companies like Hyundai have at least committed and gone through the many years of losses to get to where they are now, and we have more knowledge today, but its still hard and complicated and expensive.
Edit: its not like Tesla started with the Model Y. They had to figure out how to do things in the Model S cost effectively while building wholly new supply chains which was expensive, which gave them more leeway on margins. GM went the opposite route and started with the Bolt, but it was a money loser even though it had appeal. The bolt was very good for learning though.
'k
Note that the Nissan leaf model 2 is still air cooled and battery capacity hasn’t shown any of the problems of the early batteries.
I still think you’re overblowing the complexity here. I’m not saying there’s no R&D, of course not, I’m saying they should have gotten the bandwagon in the early days when the subsidies were higher. But I am saying that it’s not rocket science, it’s just a battery, some coolant and an electric motor. It’s far, far, far less complicated than an internal combustion engine. You sound like you swallowed some marketing whole.
I’m very skeptical of your claim that you should run the regular electronics in an EV off the main battery rather than the 12V battery. A 12V battery has power output in the hundreds of watts, whereas the main battery has power output in the hundreds of kilowatts. I don’t know how many electrical components there are where you can just multiply the power by 500 or 1000 without frying them, but I’m willing to bet it’s not the indicators or the stereo! Heating/aircon is the only application that I can conceive of using even a single kw of power, let alone hundreds of kilowatts.
Anyway, the point still stands, Ford spent way too long denying EVs are here to stay and so they’re falling at it. I had a Ford once, it was a decent family car, but my EV is far, far more fun to drive than any other vehicle I’ve driven including a lovely performance petrol car. I won’t go back.
By the way, Elon is an awful human being and I think you’d have to pay me thousands annually to convince me to drive a Tesla, and tens of billions to drive a cybertruck. I’d spend most of the billions on humanitarian charities and supporting progressive candidates in elections and campaigning against big fat vehicles and for light rail and very frequent buses.
I don’t know how many electrical components there are where you can just multiply the power by 500 or 1000 without frying them
They put an inverter on the battery and can route power more cleanly than from the front of the vehicle in the small battery, without worrying about draining the 12v in front and killing the car from starting. It also lets them do more than the could before as all the new tech is power hungry. (Edit: Think more spiderweb directly to locations, instead of routing everything from 1 point in the front)
I do agree with you that they all should have started sooner when there were better incentives.
Edit: Like you aren’t watching Netflix and/or camping in a cooled or heated car for hours on end unless it’s a battery hybrid or BEV and it’s running off the HV battery through an inverter.
Edit: here’s an article talking about wiring and Ford having 1.6km of extra wiring vs tesla/chinese OEMs who rethought the electronics system specifically for EVs. It’s new thinking like this where you have the HV battery (which is/was expensive) to get your costs down and make it profitable. Less weight, cheaper for parts, and cheaper to install/maintain. This is hundreds of dollars in savings when they’re already struggling on profitability. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ford-tore-apart-tesla-found-160356371.html
Fords in general kinda suck. I wouldn’t buy most modern american made cars tbh.
Most modern vehicles today are sucking more and more. I work on a wide variety of brands. The thing I keep seeing over the years is cheap plastic parts. Great example is the oil filter housing/oil cooler on the BMW B58 engine. There is a thin, plastic ledge that the gasket rides against. When it cracks, the gasket folds over and you get a massive coolant/oil leak. There’s a similar situation with Chrysler 3.6l V6. Or the weak intake manifolds on Mercedes OM651 diesels! Yay, boost leak!! I can keep going…
Have you seen the absolutely stupid design some minis have for their oil filter? Company I work for has a TSB on it because to get it off you have to take out the coolant reservoir. Which has a plastic part that’s honestly about 50/50 on breaking even with experience. Plastic has been a scourge on the automotive industry.
oh no… anyways
deleted by creator
