Ford recently confirmed that it will slow production of the all-electric F-150 Lightning and according to executive chair Bill Ford, this is in part because of how politicized electric vehicles have become in the United States.
All the signs were positive when orders of the F-150 Lightning kicked off in early 2022. Indeed, it took less than six months for Ford to secure 200,000 reservations for the EV, and as recently as June this year, Ford said it would triple production of the truck by the end of 2023. However, earlier this week, Ford confirmed it is actually going to slow production, blaming supply chain disruptions and quality checks.
During a recent interview with The New York Times about the firm’s ongoing contract negotiations with the UAW, Bill Ford noted that a line is now forming between blue and red states when it comes to EVs.
Read: Ford Could Cut F-150 Lightning Production Due To Waning Demand
“EV sales are still up 50 percent this year, so sales are growing very fast but we’ve also seen a politicization of EVs,” he said. “Blue states say EVs are great and we need to adopt them as soon as possible for climate reasons. Some of the red states say this is just like the vaccine, and it’s being shoved down our throat by the government, and we don’t want it. I never thought I would see the day when our products were so heavily politicized, but they are.”
Bloomberg notes that the rhetoric from President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump are very different. Whereas Biden is promoting EVs heavily with the aim of them accounting for 50% of new car sales by 2030, Trump recently slammed EVs and claimed that in the future, they will all be manufactured in China.
In the long run, Bill Ford doesn’t seem too concerned, noting that the prices of EVs will continue to fall as the car manufacturer introduces its second generation of electric vehicles.
“With our first-generation EVs, the Lightning and the Mustang Mach-E, they were done with a lot of internal combustion engineering in them,” he said. “The next generation, which will start coming quite quickly, was developed with a clean sheet of paper. When you do that you can really start taking cost out, and then you can start pricing them accordingly.”
