Ford is making a multibillion-dollar bet on electric vehicles.
At the Louisville Assembly Plant in Kentucky on Monday morning, Ford executives announced that they plan to retool the factory so they can roll out a midsize pickup truck in the $30,000 range within 18 months.
That would be not just cheap for an electric vehicle but competitively priced for a truck — period. Ford's own electric F-150 Lightning and the Chevrolet Silverado EV both start at around $50,000. Among their competitors, the Tesla Cybertruck starts at more than $62,000, and the cheapest Rivian is more than $70,000. On the gas side, meanwhile, the midsize, gas-powered Ford Ranger starts at $35,000.
This isn't the first time Ford has bet big on EVs. The Lightning, a splashy full-size pickup, was an ambitious vehicle when it debuted in 2022, but Ford has never managed to make money on it. It's a similar story with the Mustang Mach-E. Plans for a big electric SUV spluttered to a stop in 2024.
Now Ford is pivoting toward slightly smaller, significantly cheaper EVs — and doing so right as the U.S. EV industry is facing significant headwinds, including the Trump administration's efforts to roll back policies that promote EVs and fight climate change in general.
At Monday's event, Ford executives didn't make the case that the future is clean or green or eco-conscious. Instead, one word ruled the day: affordable.
This has long been the goal for a number of automakers: a truly affordable EV — one that competes with gasoline-powered cars when it comes to the up-front sticker price, without factoring in government subsidies or the savings from not using gasoline. And, no small detail, it has to be profitable for companies too.
Chinese automakers have cracked this code, and Western automakers are painfully aware of the need to catch up. Tesla has been teasing a cheaper vehicle for years, and CEO Elon Musk says it's actually coming this year. Chevrolet is on the verge of bringing back the bargain-priced Chevy Bolt.
And at the $30,000 price point, Ford thinks it can unlock a wide range of buyers who aren't tempted by the pricier EVs available right now. "It is a radically better proposition for some customers, who charge at home, don't go long distances, less than 300 miles," CEO Jim Farley told reporters after the event.
Ford's plan centers on dramatically simplifying the vehicle and breaking it up into three separate pieces, which will be built in parallel and then combined together.
It's still aspirational. "There is risk," Farley said. "The automotive industry has a graveyard littered with affordable vehicles that were launched in our country with all good intentions. And they fizzled out."
But after canceling its large electric SUV and just recently delaying a next generation of electric full-size trucks and vans, Ford held this splashy event in Louisville to make it clear it is moving forward — really — with this project.
Political headwinds, global realities
Technically, what Ford announced is not just a single vehicle but a vehicle platform, which will eventually be adapted into a variety of vehicles that are all built the same way. They'll be assembled in Kentucky with lower-cost lithium iron phosphate batteries from a Ford battery plant in Marshall, Michigan. Altogether, it's a $5 billion investment for Ford.
The Kentucky plant, which currently makes the Ford Escape and Lincoln Corsair, will close for renovations and retooling and will reopen with 2,200 jobs, 600 fewer people than it employs now. (Farley said there will be no layoffs.) The Marshall plant, which had faced an uncertain future, will now be set to open with some 1,700 jobs created.
It might seem like a strange time for a company to boast about a major EV project. President Trump, following through on a campaign promise, has been systematically dismantling the incentives and regulations that pushed automakers to make more EVs. Demand for battery-powered cars has come in lower than carmakers' expectations, and with federal tax credits expiring at the end of September, that trend is expected to slow even more.
But Farley has been clear for years now that having competitively priced EVs is an existential priority for Ford — and for other automakers.
Chinese automakers are pushing into markets around the world with appealing, competitively priced electric vehicles. If established global automakers can't compete, they could wind up with a shrinking share of the global car market.
Speaking to reporters after the event on Monday, Farley said that in some aspects of engineering, it's impossible to compete with companies like BYD, the Chinese EV giant. "Their batteries are going to be cheaper than ours," he said. "They have 120,000 power train engineers. We got 1,200." Left unmentioned: superfast battery charging, flashy in-vehicle technology and significant government subsidies from the Chinese government.
But, he said, Ford could be more efficient so the car needs less battery than its Chinese competitors do. "The only way to compete with them is innovation," he said. "And that's what we've done. That's our bet."
Is it possible?
Farley used the word "bet" intentionally, making it clear there is no guarantee of success. Making budget-priced vehicles profitably is a challenge that has defeated Detroit automakers before, and Ford's history with EVs includes a lot of false starts and lost money. In a nod to those past challenges, Ford executives repeatedly said the new vehicle had to be "sustainable" — a reference not to the environmental benefits of EVs but to the need for the car to be sustainable as a business proposition.
And, at risk of understatement, companies don't always make their initial price targets; the F-150 Lightning and the Cybertruck were both first promised to start at $40,000, a price they never actually hit.
Sam Abuelsamid, the vice president of market research at the automotive insights firm Telemetry, said that while there's no guarantee that Ford can pull this off, the new price target is "plausible."
"Most of what we know so far about what Ford is doing is not actually entirely new" for the EV industry, he said. Ford plans on reducing costs and complexity by using a small number of very large die-cast metal pieces for a truck's body, instead of a large number of small pieces; that's an innovation Tesla pioneered. It's going to use the battery as a structural component of the car; Tesla and Chinese manufacturers have been doing that too. There's a proven track record for these strategies; what's new is for a major legacy brand to implement them together.
The vehicle itself is still rather mysterious. There was no prototype onstage inside the sweltering Louisville Assembly Plant and no photos on the screen. Instead, Farley stood beside a classic Model T truck as he called the new vehicle a "Model T" moment for the company.
And while he made promises about high-tech features and the future, executives also told workers in the plant that they could look forward to a more mundane benefit from the $2 billion investment: When the plant reopens next year, Ford VP Bryce Currie told the assembled workers, it would have tempered air — and a much cooler temperature.
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