The Ford Motor Company, once at the forefront of automotive innovation, might have finally met its match in the artificial push for electric vehicles.
According to a recent report in the Wall Street Journal, Ford’s efforts to transition to all or mostly electric vehicle production is bringing their profits down almost a full 50 percent.
The Journal’s report began optimistically enough, citing that Ford’s stock was up 3 percent Wednesday on the news that Ford’s expected adjusted operating profit would hit $11 billion this year — well over the $9.6 billion that analysts had predicted.
Despite this initial good news, the Journal went on to detail the company’s woes when it comes to its EV production, especially in terms of the growing costs of EV manufacture.
According to the Journal, their EV line lost a whopping $4.7 billion last year, and the company projects things to get worse in the coming year, to the tune of between $5 billion and $5.5 billion.
If Ford wasn’t frittering away so much on such projects as the Mustang Mach-E and F-150 Lightning EVs, WSJ reported, the company’s adjusted operating profit would have been a full 50 percent higher.
Ouch.
Some of these woes stem from Ford’s current inability to take some of their most popular products — their pickup trucks and SUVs — and convert them into EVs. The problem, as the Journal explained, is that heavier vehicles like pickups and SUVs just can’t realistically be made into efficient electric vehicles.
One would think that Ford would learn from last year’s painful experience and hit the brakes on EV development, but no. Instead, they are stomping on the accelerator and vowing to pour 40 percent of the company’s capital expenditures into EVs in 2024, just as they did in 2023, according to the report.
Would you ever purchase an electric vehicle?
If Ford’s electric vehicles lost so much money, why are they continuing on the path toward bankruptcy?
EVs certainly have their fans, but those fans don’t seem to include the majority of Americans — at least, not yet.
It’s not customer demand or interest then. Why, then, this major push for something most of their customers are, at best, indifferent toward?
Clearly, it’s because Ford and most car companies believe EVs are the wave of the future, despite customer indifference.
But these companies only believe EVs are the wave of the future because of the Biden administration’s aggressive push and de facto mandates to artificially inflate EV manufacture and sales by an arbitrary date.
And not just Biden’s government, but governments all over the Western world are pushing EVs via aggressive rhetoric, insane emission standards and generous tax subsidies.
It’s essentially governments bullying consumers into buying a product they don’t actually want, all to follow a dubious strategy to reduce that bugbear of climate activists, carbon emissions.
It’s the antithesis of the free market.
You would think any company that actually wants to make money — especially Ford, the company that made cars profitable at all — would recognize that.
