- Ford is to temporarily stop production of its F-150 Lightning due to slow demand for electric vehicles in North America.
- The Lightning line in Michigan will be paused from the middle of November until January 6, 2025.
- Lightning sales are up 86 percent this year, but Tesla’s Cybertruck has proved more popular with buyers.
Ford is temporarily shutting down F-150 Lightning production as part of a plan to deal with lukewarm demand for electric vehicles that is causing problems for multiple automakers.
The Lightning line at Ford’s Rouge Electric Vehicle Center in Michigan will be idled from the middle of November until January 6, 2025, Auto News reports. Granted, that timeframe includes Ford’s regular one-week holiday shutdown, but it’s still an embarrassing fall from grace for a truck that’s supposed to be one of Ford’s halo models.
Related: Tesla Cybertruck Blasts Past Mach-E Into 3rd Place For Q3
And the decision might come as a surprise if you’ve been following Lightning news during 2024. Sales of the electric truck climbed 86 percent in the first nine months of this year versus the same period in 2023, although things weren’t perfect. Early this year Ford was forced to water down its sales predictions and cut jobs at the Rouge plant when it took the Lightning production from two shifts to one. And the F-150’s showy Tesla Cybertruck rival easily knocked it off the top of the electric truck sales chart. Tesla sold 16,692 Cybertrucks in Q3 to Ford’s 7,162 Lightnings.
Ford hasn’t revealed how much F-150 EV inventory it holds (it had 100 days of all F-150 types as of last month, per Cox Automotive), but the fact that it’s shutting the line suggests it has far too many finished Lightnings hanging around and wants to pare that inventory back. And to prevent it finding itself in the same situation with other EVs a couple of years down the road, Ford announced in August that it was delaying the introduction of another large electric truck and scrapping a planned three-row electric SUV. It will concentrate on developing smaller models and hybrids instead.
The electric slowdown has caught many automakers off guard and Ford isn’t the only brand who has been forced to idle production lines to get back on track. Fiat announced in September that it would pause production of its 500e in Italy for one month, but recently extended the shutdown for another three weeks as a result of continued poor sales.
Fortunately for Ford, it hasn’t thrown all its eggs in the electric basket and can still offer buyers combustion-engined trucks. But Fiat killed off its combustion 500 and has now been forced to re-engineer the EV model to accept a hybrid powertrain, a project that will take a couple of years.
We’ve contacted Ford for a comment and will provide an update on this story as soon as they respond.
