A more expensive good, sold at a time when everything is more expensive and we continue to make equities the primary vessel for the surplus value generated by labor, instead of paying the labor, which would enable them to buy the more expensive good.
Also, how about make smaller cheaper pickups. These giant pickups cost a small fortune. A small affordable pickup would do well on the market, including an electric one.
The refresh jacked up the price, because, well, they can.
This is North America. With the exception of a few relatively small metro areas, if you live in the US or Canada, you must own a car in order to survive. They've got it; you need it. Pay up.
There's also the impact of CAFE rules. "Let the market sort it out" types often point to these as perverse incentives ruining the profitability of small trucks, but they forget that the automakers lobbied for the light truck exemption.
Theoretically, you'd need to raise less capital once the business is established.
Money paid out to some retiree who doesn't even know that they hold shares through their retirement or pension plan is money not put into company bank accounts to fund future business endeavors.
Actually, speaking of the retiree, I don't know what it is, exactly, that the modern shareholder brings to the table that justifies their returns, especially in situations where they receive a dividend. The vast majority of shares of most publicly-traded companies are held by financial institutions who have a fiduciary duty to account holders. That means that, at the drop of a hat, they need to be able to exit their position on a given equity and put the money into something that either earns more money or loses less of it. They have as little attachment to the stock, and thus the business fitness, of the company as is possible. This means they don't care how things are going at the company. In a society that puts a lot of essential services, goods, and infrastructure in the hands of publicly-traded corporations, this means no one cares how things are going at the institutions holding up massive parts of society. See Boeing and their QC woes over the last decade while also noting their importance to American national security.
Outside our particular bubble EVs are not as popular as you might think they are by reading HN.
I have an EV, but I also have a couple ICEs at home between me an my wife. The EV is great for urban use, taking kids to school and everywhere else, buying groceries, but for road trips, anything beyond a single charge roundtrip radius we use our ICEs.
I will probably replace one of my ICEs with an hybrid, but not an EV, and probably when that time comes, I will sell both one of the ICE and the EV.
Expensive insurance, the fear of a battery fire, expensive suspension repairs, premature tires replacement. Lots of negatives that very few people think about. And really, I don't like the agressive driving style the instant torque encourages me to adopt.
My biggest problem with BEVs is regression in charging (fueling) experience compared to ICE. Unless one is able to charge at home people are forced to use barely functional infrastructure dependent on sketchy applications and then wasting dozens of minutes (best case) to hours at a charger.
Compare it to ICE - fueled in a minute and you can then pay by card or cash. No applications required.
I really liked the idea behind the Lightning - finally an EV that can be used as a whole-home battery backup. I've been looking for a semi-off-grid property (at least ability to disconnect from the grid and survive without noticing should there be an extended grid outage) and the Lightning announcement was exciting until you learned the specifics of it all.
Good idea, but the execution needed to be better. I hope more EVs come along that incorporate the whole "battery backup on wheels" idea that can integrate into a solar power setup easily and efficiently. Ideally have some static batteries installed at the property, and when the vehicle is plugged in it simply augments that battery storage to extend runtime.
Of course I assume the addressable market for folks like me is in the dozens, so I understand as an actual truck it more or less failed after talking to a few Truck Guys.
I don't actually care about battery backup for my house. I have an $800 generator for that which is not tied to my truck being parked in front of the house.
I do want my pickup truck to be a good pickup truck, and the impression I get is that the Lightning is really an F150 and does a good job at that.
I ordered my ICE F150 in late 2022 (delivered in 2023), so don't plan to buy a new truck for another 7-9 years.
When I was ordering, the Lightnings were just not available. Even if they were, however, you can only get the Lightning in the crew cab short bed configuration with a 145" wheel base.
I wanted a 6.5' bed, so the Lightning doesn't offer that. For a classic F150, you can get 2 wheel base options with 3 different cab/bed combinations.
The frunk with lockable storage is actually a really attractive feature though in terms of carrying tools or other things you want secure and out of the weather.
I don't think anybody really needs to move around town their home battery backup weighing 4 tons... I mean, if storage is needed, I think getting static batteries should cost nowadays only a third of the price of a car, so while putting some energy in the car might be convenient, it cannot be the main solution to the home energy storage needs. (edited for typos)
For many people outages are infrequent enough and short enough that an EV could be their main solution for getting through them. Maybe a couple outages a year, usually at most a few hours, with maybe every few years one that lasts 12-24 hours.
Maybe Ford need to sell a cut-down version with a smaller battery alongside it. I thought the idea of powering work tools from the Lightning was good but I guess it may not match how people work.
I like the look of the upcoming Ford e-Transit Courier but it will be a lot more expensive than the ICE versions.
Cost by the time it came out for actual purchase was the first one. When it was announced the cost (as I recall it) seemed quite reasonable for the capabilities.
Then the inverter size was severely undersized with no real ability to power a full sized home without making large sacrifices. Around 9kw if I recall correctly, which means (for me at least) no running A/C and a large electric appliance at the same time like a dryer.
Then it required using Sunrun as the only system integrator - plus all their equipment. I guess this is to be expected, but I'd like to design my own system.
I'm in the same boat as you though - I never looked into beyond surface level since I have enough random projects to think about as it is, and no property yet to turn any research into a practical system.
I wonder what went wrong there. The F-150 is objectively a very popular truck, right? So I’d expect the electric version to be very popular as well.
I’d love an electric truck, but I wouldn’t want one of these awful giant things with huge cabs and a tiny little bed. However, I don’t think this is the reason, my taste is apparently not very representative. I miss my grandpa’s truck though, single cab, bench seat, loads of garbage in the bed, let’s go to the dump. Simpler times.
What I learned in ECON 101 is that in a competitive market, price decrease to the level the market will bear. Isn't this the "cheaper" alternative to the Cyber-truck?
A quick search said a new one would cost $80k delivered, how much can the price decrease before Ford is losing money?
To clarify on other peoples' comments, the cheapest form of the F-150, which is particularly affordable for an electric truck, was very difficult to get ahold of. Additionally, demand for electric vehicles in the US is significantly weaker than manufacturers had hoped.
As someone living in a condo, I am 0% surprised. If you don't have a fully-enclosed garage, I'd be surprised if there was a simple solution for charging, and the idea of sitting at a station for 45 minutes twice a week sounds... miserable at best. Even if you disagree with me on these points, I doubt my point of view is particularly rare.
As an F150 owner, I can largely agree. It certainly is crazy expensive. But if you look at the missions people have for trucks, hauling, towing, road trips with significant cargo, the charging factor just gets ugly. How is that battery life while towing your boat to the lake? How many charging stations are there near the boat ramp so that you can get home again? ??
Now, for the contractor bopping around town, charging is much less of an issue, and being able to power all of your tools 1/2 mile from the nearest power pole is very useful. But the Lightening was not priced at the “tradesman” trim level.
From the pragmatic perspective, either fuel has to be a lot more expensive, or the truck should be like 50% cheaper. Intuitively, the proposition is "it's just batteries and a motor, no complicated pistons, injectors etc...". Yet it's super-expensive.
Then maybe marketing? At least from my limited perspective, the people who would buy F-150 are not exactly the ones to want to sit and wait next to small electric cars to charge for half an hour at charging station. That's why perhaps a cybertruck works, it doesn't look like a "truck" and doesn't appeal to the same crowd. It's a whole new thing. It seems "cool" while this one seems "lame". The Ford marketing department should have sniffed that out better than a rando HN poster at least.
A brief perusing of the Ford website, the non-electric F-150 starts at $38,710, whereas the electric version starts at $62,995. I suspect most people can't afford the 50% premium. The price for the non-electric version is already eye-wateringly expensive for my personal income.
Price and range. IMO EV trucks need at least a 500 mile range unloaded and no less than 250 mile range when towing at max capacity at highway speeds. Yes, ridiculously high requirements but they won’t compete with a gas engine version (much less a diesel one) otherwise.
Three things:
1. It is a very expensive vehicle.
2. Towing reduces the range substantially.
3. Charging infrastructure needs to be more reliable and we need much more of it. There are times when you won't charge at home.
I have the F-150 Lightning and I love it. I think I could love a smaller truck, maybe between the Maverick and the modern Ranger. The F-150 is huge.
I think of demand for EVs as being a little stronger among liberals and demand for trucks as being a little stronger among conservatives, so perhaps the venn diagram intersection takes a (small) hit from that.
This. Everyone in the South drives a truck, and most of those people have lumped "EV" in with "big city liberal". Cost is the other big factor and maybe range anxiety.
I think this is Elon's big problem. He already has all the liberal geeks interested in that tech, but has to expand and is thus trying to endear himself to the conservative crowd hoping the backlash in his main customer base isn't too bad. It's not working. The cyber truck is not only expensive and extremely poorly made, but it's also far too radical for most of that crowd.
A lot of folks here are saying price. They’re not necessarily wrong, list price IS an issue. However Ford dealers have implemented huge incentives to sell them. Leasing and Financing, one dealer offered me 20k off MSRP to buy one.
I would actually argue price isn’t the issue but is an easy low hanging fruit we can blame.
When people buy trucks they do so for security mentally and otherwise. Americans buy trucks to be able to haul around something once a year, to have enough room for the family, to tow things, to go on long road trips, to go over landing, to have the ability to go off-road as needed.
Much of America is rural and has dirt roads or other light infrastructure. During storms trees fall on roads and have to be moved or gone around. I lived 10 minutes from an urban center and my house had one road to/from. Once every 6 months a tree would fall on the road and block access.
Tl;dr people buy trucks for peace of mind, their capability, and rare events that can affect them. Because vehicles are such a huge purchase they buy more incase they need it.
The lightning is neither capable nor offers peace of mind due to its limitations in range, towing, and charging station availability.
I bought a used F-150 Lightning with 1000 miles on it. I paid $21k under the sticker price. It was still expensive. I have no range concerns but I'm mostly in the city.
You are looking at a chart that only has one full year on it. 2023 has good growth over 2022. 2024 may end up being flat, but every year prior has seen growth.
The Model Y is the best-selling car in the world. The Cybertruck is outselling every non-Tesla EV including the Lightning (in the US, the only country where it is currently available).
Funny how two people can look at the same chart and see exactly what they want.
One person sees a roughly flat multi-year sales chart (true) and another sees significant growth in the last quarter (true) and somehow they arrive at opposite conclusions.
The number of cars didn’t go up dramatically but the margins on each car improved. It makes for a healthier company that can go out and do other things like make little buses.
They went away from Brazil because their cars weren't competitive. Even in GeoGuessr if I see a Ford I know that I'm in USA, because is the only place where they are used. I do not follow the auto market, but I never hear news about this iconic brand.
Far from it - the F150 has been the best selling vehicle for over 40 years, and they do nearly 200b in revenue.
I think they just quit competing on price and volume - they've gutted their entire car lineup except for the Mustang, for example. In my own shopping, I found that Ford was considerably more expensive than the alternatives. Even the much advertised Maverick is creeping into the 30ks. Maybe it's worth it, I sure wasn't going to find out...but they do sell a -lot- of trucks.
Sort of, but the popularity of the F-150 and Mustang could prop up quite a large company. There's a reason they stopped selling sedans even in the US, though.
Waning demand might be one factor, but the word on the street about the F-150 Lighthing has been generally pretty negative (justified or not, I don't know). So softening of the EV market may not be the whole story.
Has it been? I own one, did a bunch of research before I bought one, know others who own them, and the positive stories massively outnumber the negative ones from my perspective.
Disruption at work. Ford can't make money on selling EV's, their overall margin suffers with every EV they sell. They have large existing investments in factories, processes and people that produce combustion engines. They can't lower prices and sell enough of them for economies of scale to start working.
Tesla is the new Ford. Ford (and most other car manufacturers) will have a difficult time, most manufacturers are probably doomed. After the current hesitation phase, when the economics are there (very soon), customers will almost all go electric.
What investors (and their "agents" CEOs) want is ROI, which depends on not only total profit, but also total amount invested and how long it has to stay invested. Hence the relevance when GP says that "They have large existing investments in factories, processes and people that produce combustion engines".
Readit News
The refresh jacked up the price, because, well, they can.
This is North America. With the exception of a few relatively small metro areas, if you live in the US or Canada, you must own a car in order to survive. They've got it; you need it. Pay up.
There's also the impact of CAFE rules. "Let the market sort it out" types often point to these as perverse incentives ruining the profitability of small trucks, but they forget that the automakers lobbied for the light truck exemption.
https://electrek.co/2024/10/28/fords-new-electric-pickup-riv...
Money paid out to some retiree who doesn't even know that they hold shares through their retirement or pension plan is money not put into company bank accounts to fund future business endeavors.
Actually, speaking of the retiree, I don't know what it is, exactly, that the modern shareholder brings to the table that justifies their returns, especially in situations where they receive a dividend. The vast majority of shares of most publicly-traded companies are held by financial institutions who have a fiduciary duty to account holders. That means that, at the drop of a hat, they need to be able to exit their position on a given equity and put the money into something that either earns more money or loses less of it. They have as little attachment to the stock, and thus the business fitness, of the company as is possible. This means they don't care how things are going at the company. In a society that puts a lot of essential services, goods, and infrastructure in the hands of publicly-traded corporations, this means no one cares how things are going at the institutions holding up massive parts of society. See Boeing and their QC woes over the last decade while also noting their importance to American national security.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dearborn_Independent
I have an EV, but I also have a couple ICEs at home between me an my wife. The EV is great for urban use, taking kids to school and everywhere else, buying groceries, but for road trips, anything beyond a single charge roundtrip radius we use our ICEs.
I will probably replace one of my ICEs with an hybrid, but not an EV, and probably when that time comes, I will sell both one of the ICE and the EV.
Expensive insurance, the fear of a battery fire, expensive suspension repairs, premature tires replacement. Lots of negatives that very few people think about. And really, I don't like the agressive driving style the instant torque encourages me to adopt.
Compare it to ICE - fueled in a minute and you can then pay by card or cash. No applications required.
Good idea, but the execution needed to be better. I hope more EVs come along that incorporate the whole "battery backup on wheels" idea that can integrate into a solar power setup easily and efficiently. Ideally have some static batteries installed at the property, and when the vehicle is plugged in it simply augments that battery storage to extend runtime.
Of course I assume the addressable market for folks like me is in the dozens, so I understand as an actual truck it more or less failed after talking to a few Truck Guys.
I do want my pickup truck to be a good pickup truck, and the impression I get is that the Lightning is really an F150 and does a good job at that.
I ordered my ICE F150 in late 2022 (delivered in 2023), so don't plan to buy a new truck for another 7-9 years.
When I was ordering, the Lightnings were just not available. Even if they were, however, you can only get the Lightning in the crew cab short bed configuration with a 145" wheel base.
I wanted a 6.5' bed, so the Lightning doesn't offer that. For a classic F150, you can get 2 wheel base options with 3 different cab/bed combinations.
The frunk with lockable storage is actually a really attractive feature though in terms of carrying tools or other things you want secure and out of the weather.
I like the look of the upcoming Ford e-Transit Courier but it will be a lot more expensive than the ICE versions.
Then the inverter size was severely undersized with no real ability to power a full sized home without making large sacrifices. Around 9kw if I recall correctly, which means (for me at least) no running A/C and a large electric appliance at the same time like a dryer.
Then it required using Sunrun as the only system integrator - plus all their equipment. I guess this is to be expected, but I'd like to design my own system.
I'm in the same boat as you though - I never looked into beyond surface level since I have enough random projects to think about as it is, and no property yet to turn any research into a practical system.
I’d love an electric truck, but I wouldn’t want one of these awful giant things with huge cabs and a tiny little bed. However, I don’t think this is the reason, my taste is apparently not very representative. I miss my grandpa’s truck though, single cab, bench seat, loads of garbage in the bed, let’s go to the dump. Simpler times.
But they CRAZY expensive.
Is it cost of production being passed on or did the marketing department decide to do some "prestige" pricing?
A quick search said a new one would cost $80k delivered, how much can the price decrease before Ford is losing money?
As someone living in a condo, I am 0% surprised. If you don't have a fully-enclosed garage, I'd be surprised if there was a simple solution for charging, and the idea of sitting at a station for 45 minutes twice a week sounds... miserable at best. Even if you disagree with me on these points, I doubt my point of view is particularly rare.
Now, for the contractor bopping around town, charging is much less of an issue, and being able to power all of your tools 1/2 mile from the nearest power pole is very useful. But the Lightening was not priced at the “tradesman” trim level.
Then maybe marketing? At least from my limited perspective, the people who would buy F-150 are not exactly the ones to want to sit and wait next to small electric cars to charge for half an hour at charging station. That's why perhaps a cybertruck works, it doesn't look like a "truck" and doesn't appeal to the same crowd. It's a whole new thing. It seems "cool" while this one seems "lame". The Ford marketing department should have sniffed that out better than a rando HN poster at least.
I have the F-150 Lightning and I love it. I think I could love a smaller truck, maybe between the Maverick and the modern Ranger. The F-150 is huge.
There also needs to be pull through charging options. I'm not disconnecting a trailer to charge my vehicle.
I think this is Elon's big problem. He already has all the liberal geeks interested in that tech, but has to expand and is thus trying to endear himself to the conservative crowd hoping the backlash in his main customer base isn't too bad. It's not working. The cyber truck is not only expensive and extremely poorly made, but it's also far too radical for most of that crowd.
I would actually argue price isn’t the issue but is an easy low hanging fruit we can blame.
When people buy trucks they do so for security mentally and otherwise. Americans buy trucks to be able to haul around something once a year, to have enough room for the family, to tow things, to go on long road trips, to go over landing, to have the ability to go off-road as needed.
Much of America is rural and has dirt roads or other light infrastructure. During storms trees fall on roads and have to be moved or gone around. I lived 10 minutes from an urban center and my house had one road to/from. Once every 6 months a tree would fall on the road and block access.
Tl;dr people buy trucks for peace of mind, their capability, and rare events that can affect them. Because vehicles are such a huge purchase they buy more incase they need it.
The lightning is neither capable nor offers peace of mind due to its limitations in range, towing, and charging station availability.
Price
Hmm... seems Tesla is flat over the last few years: https://www.reuters.com/graphics/TESLA-DELIVERIES/gkvlbmzmev...
You are looking at a chart that only has one full year on it. 2023 has good growth over 2022. 2024 may end up being flat, but every year prior has seen growth.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/502208/tesla-quarterly-v...
People are abandoning Tesla in droves, presumably due to the spectacle its owner is making of himself publicly.
One person sees a roughly flat multi-year sales chart (true) and another sees significant growth in the last quarter (true) and somehow they arrive at opposite conclusions.
They went away from Brazil because their cars weren't competitive. Even in GeoGuessr if I see a Ford I know that I'm in USA, because is the only place where they are used. I do not follow the auto market, but I never hear news about this iconic brand.
I think they just quit competing on price and volume - they've gutted their entire car lineup except for the Mustang, for example. In my own shopping, I found that Ford was considerably more expensive than the alternatives. Even the much advertised Maverick is creeping into the 30ks. Maybe it's worth it, I sure wasn't going to find out...but they do sell a -lot- of trucks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_EV1
It is a joke, but one that makes me nervous.
Tesla is the new Ford. Ford (and most other car manufacturers) will have a difficult time, most manufacturers are probably doomed. After the current hesitation phase, when the economics are there (very soon), customers will almost all go electric.
It seems like the bigger concern is that the trucks simply arent selling