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.
The way they match that is by lobbying the Australian government to jack the tariff on Chinese vehicles through the roof compared to vehicles made anywhere else, particularly North America.
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.
I'm not saying seize the means of production. I'm saying "stop putting all of the money into places where it does no good". That's simple as giving a pay raise without a corresponding price increase to offset the costs to shareholders, who often have no real association with the enterprise.
The entire premise of an economy is people exchange money for goods and services. Instead of having money available for that exercise, we've locked a lot of the value produced into equities that are left mainly as unrealized gains. The unrealized gains must continuously go up while the ability for people to participate in the economy by spending money that they earned has gone down, because they receive less of the share of their labor.
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.
Batteries? Assuming a $150/kwh cost for batteries, that would be $14,700 for a 98 kwh pack, or $19,650 for a 131 kwh pack. I think the rumor is that GM is hoping to hit ~$100 for their batteries in 2025. It will be a game changer once batteries get below $50/kwh. And some Chinese batteries are getting close.
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?
Where are you located? I'm seeing sub-$60,000 options that have been sitting on the lot for a while, so if you really want one, you could negotiate a below MSRP price, and then get the $7,500 tax credit.
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.
A good work truck is one you don't mind getting scratched and dented. Hard to replicate that with any brand new vehicle, especially one with a $60k starting price.
That said, I think the Lightning serves certain roles really well. They're great for the forest service, for municipalities, utilities, etc. If they were actually cheaper than the ICE version I think they'd gain a lot of adoption for those kinds of fleets.
Since they're quite a bit more expensive, though, buyers have to make the case that they're worth it. Pretty tough proposition unless you're trying to sneak under an emissions budget.
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.
Given that cars are such a large investment and that virtually the entire addressable market already has one, the bar to buying an EV is incredibly high: "can it do everything my old vehicle does?"
The answer today fpr truck buyers is no, no matter how you slice it. I think Toyota played their hand perfectly with the hybrid Prius, keeping it familiar enough to regular cars that the sole element of comparison came down to something they could win at (gas mileage). EV trucks get dinged on a dozen other points of comparison where they lose, eg towing, refueling time, etc.
I'd be really curious to know if a major truck maker has a hybrid truck in development, eg a hybrid Toyota Tacoma/HiLux. That would be very interesting indeed. If nothing else it would seed the consumers' brains with real data on how they actually drive, which could influence their buying behavior for the next truck.
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.
people generally don't look at quarter-to-quarter growth because there can be wild swings explained by seasonality (e.g. the major holiday shopping season in Q4)
They are so vertically integrated, control much of their supply chain, and are not hamstrung by an increasingly erratic and irrational CEO.
Test drove both Model 3 Performance and BYD Seal Performance both before settling on a Tesla, it was close. Price wise about 20% cheaper (I am in a country that does not put tariffs on BYD).
But currently, the BYD software is….. not great, comparatively. The cars are decently made though, and look pretty good. Drive ok, but M3P is a much sharper drive.
Another vehicle generation of improvement though, Tesla would need to watch their backs.
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".
Margin is profit over total revenue, not profit over Capital invested
When someone buys stock on the market, they are giving money to another trader. They are not giving money to the company to invest in production capacity.
Shareholder profit tracks net corporate profit, not profit margin. It's better to hold a stock that makes a 1% margin on a billion dollars revenue, then one that has a 90% margin on $10 of revenue
>When you buy ford stock, none of that money goes to the company for capital investment
Companies regularly sell their own stock and use it for capital investment. It is an important way that large capital projects are funded in capitalistic countries.
Federal Express is a great example: as a start-up, it could not become profitable till it had a big network (planes, airport landing rights, a huge sorting facility) so the cost of the network had to be paid for by selling stock or by borrowing, and corporations at least in the US raise more money from stock sales than they do from borrowing.
Another example is training AI models: most of the tens of billions of dollars in GPUs and electricity that has been used or will soon be used to train AI models comes from the sale of stock.
You are talking about IPOs and other secondary stock offers.
During secondary stock offers, Investors will care about how much value the addition funds will create relative to cash put in.
Still, this is different than a percent profit margin on sales. Investors care about the total profit, not the percent margin.
going back to the actual situation, EV's lowering the percent profit margin doesnt matter as long as they are increating the total profit.
If you sell 1 million gas cars at 20% profit, and can sell 1 million EVs at 10% margin, you are still better off selling the EVs and taking the 15% margin on 2 million cars.
The idea that ford is dialing back production because it lowers their percent margin isnt a realistic justification. especially after the funds have been sunk in manufacturing.
I have hope the Ramcharger will be popular - small gas engine that charges a battery which runs the drivetrain, so effectively zero range anxiety but efficiency and speed of an EV.
The gas-electric model such as has been developed by Chinese manufacturers and licensed to Toyota (I believe) that let you get many hundreds of miles on a single tank of gas) seems relatively compelling. For cars, anyway. Putting that into a diesel work truck seems like re-inventing the locomotive, with a massive battery pack.
> Putting that into a diesel work truck seems like re-inventing the locomotive, with a massive battery pack.
Sorry I am not following this conclusion. Ramcharger is doing this next year. Massive pulling capacity and acceleration of an EV drivetrain, regular battery for the size of vehicle, and small electricity generating engine to keep the battery charged.
I still don't understand why people would think EVs would succeed as quickly in America, as they are in Europe and China.
France is a little smaller than Texas. If you live in France, how often are you driving to Portugal, Belgium, or Germany? Not often. The maximum amount of range you will ever drive is quite constrained.
How often do Americans go on road trips from Minnesota to California, or from California to New York, or from Minnesota to Mexico, or from Montana to Florida? All the time, by comparison. Some will do it multiple times per year. People buy cars with the maximum in mind, not the average.
Those are long hauls, but in Illinois it’s pretty common to drive to places like Nashville or Atlanta. We drive to Orlando so that we don’t have to deal with flying. That’s a long one but not bad. An EV would add a lot of time and risk.
> You drive 30+ hours round trip to avoid 6 hours of flying?
Lots of people do. If you are making $60K a year (the median in the US - half of employed people make less), and you have 3 children and live in California, what's your plan to visit relatives in, say, Nebraska? Buy 10 plane tickets? Driving the 2,600 miles both ways, at 25 MPG, will cost you "only" $320 round trip.
I understand the cost issue for a large family, but he said "so that we don’t have to deal with flying", not "it's too expensive".
Also, SFO to JFK is as low as $640 round trip for a family of 5 on the right days, and $760 in gas at 25 MPG and $3.30/gal. Plus you're going to need several nights of lodging unless you want to spend 40 straight hours in a car packed with kids.
I see you edited your comment to change the destination to Nebraska to make your numbers look better. Round trip SFO to Omaha for a family of 5 can be had for $655 according to Google Flights, vs. $440 in gas at 25 MPG and $3.30/gal, but again you'll need at least two nights of lodging for the whole family, and on a trip that long you should also account for part of an oil change and tire change and other car maintenance expenses.
Not to mention the cost of your time, which should factor highly for well paid people that can afford to fly anyways, and if you are low paid, it’s likely your vacation time is scarce, so you wouldn’t want to use it all in the transport.
The comparison just makes no sense to me. I take road trips because I love road trips, not because I think the economics are somehow better than flying.
I don't enjoy getting 4 kids through the TSA line, while trying to get my belt back on and not have my wallet stolen. I don't enjoy parking at the airport and having my license plate sticker stolen and have to deal with 6 tickets because of it. Among other things.
I'll take 30 minutes in line and 5 minutes of fiddling with personal belongings over 30 hours driving a car packed with 4 kids every day of the week and twice on Sunday. 30 hours! Even if my whole license plate was stolen every time it'd still be worth it.
It's just one more thing I have to consider. Even if I only take 3-4 500 mile trips per year, I don't EVER have to think, well jeez we'll need to stop 3 times for 30-45 minutes in specific places to charge up. We might also have to wait in line if it's a busy weekend/holiday. When I can easily do 450 miles on 1 charge and the price of the vehicle is comparable, then it's at least worth considering. The closest thing to that right now in the F-150's class is the Chevrolet Silverado RST. But it's "only" $93,000. Thanks, I'll keep my gasoline F-150 for now.
This is a big factor. The whole reason I have a truck is so I can get away for the weekend maybe once a month.
Adding 2-3 recharge stops is a deal breaker for a weekend warrior. Nobody wants to spend an hour charging stop before they get to a campground or when they heading home to get ready for work on Monday.
I agree that it's not realistic to expect cross-continent trips to be common, but I think there is a real difference in the west of the USA vs most of Europe. In the American central and western areas, things are more spread out and driving everywhere is the expectation such that it affects how cities and suburbs are spaced, while Europe grew mostly before the automobile, and towns and cities are closer together and more compact.
Yes people cross borders in Europe, but mostly when they live in a border area. People aren't making 300km trips to cross a border very often, but 50km, sure.
According to the US Government, more than 32 million trips every year exceed 1,000 miles - and that's only during the "16-week period between Memorial Day weekend and Labor Day." 37 percent of those trips are by vehicle; so about 12 million 1000+ mile trips by car during those 16 weeks alone. That's not small.
Figure 2 trips average per traveler, and that's 6 million car buyers.
And I wonder how many are in specific market segments. For example, maybe not many luxury or super-luxury car owners; they fly. Maybe lots of minivans and SUVs for families and capacity. Maybe not many economy cars.
I think road trips are a critical consideration for a subset of consumers- especially those in the market for a non-work truck.
Road trips make up a tiny fraction of the miles/hours on my truck, but they are the primary reason why I have a truck at all instead of a Prius or something.
> How often do Americans go on road trips from Minnesota to California, or from California to New York, or from Minnesota to Mexico, or from Montana to Florida?
Rarely. Certainly not multiple times a year on average.
Perhaps the demographic buying F150 sized trucks is different, but it's definitely not the norm to be making multi-day long road trips multiple times per year. Most folks don't even have that much vacation time to burn - and if they do - they likely are working office style jobs where flights are going to be an affordable expense.
It would be interesting to see stats on this though. I do agree people tend to buy for the maximum not the average. But I've found people - at least in my circle - grossly overestimate how common the maximum is.
Midwest to Midwest road trips are common. Midwest to the coasts tend to be rare, but that's all anecdote we can fight about. Once you get beyond about 16 hours I think the curve starts to flatten quite a bit.
60% of US households have more than one car, compared to only 30% in France. I'd expect that to help with EV adoption in the US. Get one car with long range and good cargo and/or towing capacity for roadtrips and for when you have a lot to move locally and get an EV for most of your daily driving.
The second car in the US though is disproportionately likely to be a beater; or much older vehicle. Combine that with that American vehicles have an average age of 12.5 years compared to 10.5 in France; and the picture is more like Americans keep their old cars around instead of selling/disposing of them.
That does not mean they will buy an EV and feel confident in relying on that second vehicle for long distance. If it's anything like the families I know, the beater's only job is to fill up short distance trips, to avoid wear on the newer car, until the day it "runs into the ground."
Ford has also done a decent job of over-promising. I put a deposit on the Lightning the morning after their announcement. They originally priced it at $40k[0], and now their base model starts at $63k[1]. When the opportunity finally came up for me to buy one, the two lower trim levels were unavailable, and the best I could get was something like $75k, which was a hard pass for me.
