The last Twitter Space Elon Musk attempted to host didn’t go so well, but he’s trying again anyway. Instead of a politician announcing a run for president, however, he’s logging on to talk with Ford CEO Jim Farley about “Accelerating EV adoption.”
With competition for electric cars heating up — are we about to see a new partnership for Tesla? The event is scheduled to start at 5:30PM ET.
Ford CEO Jim Farley doesn’t expect his company to make a lot of money off the in-car software experience, which is why he’s happy to cede control of the touchscreen to Apple and Google. GM disagrees. So does Tesla. But as Farley notes in this interview with WSJ’s Joanna Stern, why would Ford say “good luck” to its customers by cutting off that access, especially when 70 percent of them are also Apple customers?
The automaker expects to lose $3 billion this year on its EV sales, but the outlook is certainly improving. Ford says its EV business grew 41 percent this quarter on sales of 10,866 units. That includes 4,291 F-150 Lightning trucks and a 62.7 percent increase in E-Transit delivery vans. Sales of Mustang Mach-E was down reflecting downtime at the factory for changes designed to improve production. Ford said it’s still on track to hit a run rate of 150,000 EVs this year — hopefully without any more recalls.
Five months after it pulled the plug on its autonomous vehicle division Argo.ai, Ford is continuing to divest itself from fully driverless technology. Today, the company filed a notice with the feds that basically retreats from its former position of wanting to deploy vast numbers of robot vehicles. The reason?
We believe the road to fully autonomous vehicles, at scale, with a profitable business model, will be a long one.
Long car rides are the worst, right?
March 13th to be exact, according to CNBC. That’s almost a month after Ford ordered a temporary halt on production and delivery of the F-150 Lightning in response to a battery fire in one of its factory lots. There hasn’t been a formal recall, and Ford’s battery supplier is claiming innocence in the whole matter. Tensions are high around EVs and batteries, so Ford needs to be super cautious as it restarts production for its most important vehicle in its lineup.
With the F-150 Lightning under a stop production and shipment order, Ford is facing a familiar problem. A decade of expensive recalls and new-car issues leaves the Blue Oval in a tough spot as it builds its EV lineup.
The fire took place February 4th at a holding lot in Michigan during a pre-delivery quality inspection and “spread to another vehicle,” a Ford spokesperson told Automotive News. The automaker recently extended its temporary halt on production and shipment until at least the end of next week.
[Automotive News]
We don’t know what’s wrong with the battery, but we do know that Ford has put a temporary halt on production and shipment of its popular electric pickup. There’s no recall, no reported incidents, and no stop-sale order to dealers, so it’s a bit of a mystery at the moment. Ford CEO Jim Farley is reportedly cracking down on quality issues at the automaker, so this could be an example of Ford trying to get ahead of the problem before it gets worse.
Ford bumped the price of its popular F-150 Lightning EV in August up by $7,000, and now Bloomberg and Automotive News report that the fleet-focused Lightning Pro just jumped in price by another $5K. It now starts at $51,974, plus the $1,795 delivery fee.
The company said it’s “due to ongoing supply chain constraints, rising material costs, and other market factors.”
The Blue Oval company tripled the number of electric vehicles sold last month, led by robust demand for the F-150 Lightning truck. Ford’s share of the overall EV market is also up 3.1 percentage points over last year with 7.0 percent share — which still places it as a distant second to Tesla. BlueCruise, the company’s hands-free driver assist system for highways, is being used by 83,000 customers, who have used it for over 21 million miles.
Running out of semiconductors is one thing, but running out of your own iconic nameplates is just downright brutal. The Wall Street Journal reports badge and nameplate shortages are impacting the automaker’s popular F-series pickup lineup, delaying deliveries and causing general chaos.
Some executives are even proposing a 3D printing workaround, but they didn’t feel like the substitutes would clear the bar. All in all, it’s been a dreadful summer of supply chain setbacks for Ford, leading the company to reorganize its org chart to bring some sort of relief.
