Ford launched its first fully electric vehicle (EV), the Mustang Mach-E to much fanfare late in 2020. Since then the Detroit-based automaker has expanded their EV lineup to include the F-150 Lightning and E-Transit commercial van, and grown their EV sales to over 60,000 units globally last year.
Ford has lost of lot money on its way to becoming the second largest EV maker in the US behind Tesla, and it expects to continue bleeding cash for several more years as it attempts to ramp production to 600,000 units in 2023 and 2 million units per year by 2026.
The automaker announced on Thursday its newly formed ‘Model e’ division has lost a total of $6 billion during the three year EV ramp, with $2.1 billion of that amount occurring last year. The losses won’t stop any time soon, with Ford saying it expects to post an even bigger loss of around $3 billion in 2023, driven mainly by the investments required to ramp production.
As it has previously stated, Ford does not expect its Model e division to become profitable on a pretax basis until 2026. It could be even longer than that however, as that target is based on the assumption the automaker is able to ramp production to 600,000 units by the end of this year, and 2 million by 2026, an ambitious target for any automaker.
Ford hasn’t started 2023 off on the right foot. Production of the F-150 Lightning was shut down for over one month after one of the electric pickup trucks caught fire in a holding lot in February. A subsequent investigation identified the battery pack as the cause, and a fix took several weeks to fully implement, allowing Ford to resume production on March 13.
The issue impacted 18 F-150 Lightning trucks already delivered to customers, all of which have been recalled and will have their battery packs replaced at no cost to the owner.
Ford reveals cause of F-150 Lightning battery fire in recall notice
