Ford cutting 2024 F-150 Lightning production plans by half | Hacker News Reader

Ford cutting 2024 F-150 Lightning production plans by half

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28 pointsgrecy86 comments

They scaled the production for the $40,000 truck they promised, but only gave the dealers the $58,000 or up models to sell. If you could buy a Lightning for $32,500 after federal tax credit they wouldn't be able to keep them on the lot. But that inital pent up demand was very high so they jacked the price way up to try to capture more money, and now they can't drop it back to Earth to reinvigorate the demand. Also, they're losing money on every truck they sell so dropping the price is undoubtedly distasteful to management, even though everyone knows that volume is how you make money.

Pretty much every dealer here in the Houston area, which might be the pickup capital of the world (or at least feels like it), is selling them for closer to $80k.

Or more accurately not selling them, and also refusing to budge on the price.

The industry should reset to the power/volume/mass ratio of a 2010 Toyota Tundra, and then design an EV.

2007 Tundra Limited is peak Tundra for me.

I did an auto maker sponsored in person market study and the F150 Lightning was being compared with luxury brands because of the common MSRP points.

This 40K electric truck doesn’t really exist.

What did you say?

Increase volume when you lose money on every unit?

This isn't software... especially when you better accrue a giant pot of warranty money for the inevitable battery and system recalls over the early infant years.

I agree with your initial premise about actually introducing low-cost versions, but these must be subsidized by the high margin versions just like airline flights. Business travel pays for the infrastructure used by the masses.

The whole model depends on high-margin cash flow carrying the business forward into the high-volume, low-margin production. If there isn't any cash leftover, the whole thing crashes into the terminal at the end of the runway in a fireball.

> Increase volume when you lose money on every unit?

The only way to eventually make money is to streamline production, which means leveraging economies of scale. Trying to cut back on production to avoid losses is a losing proposition in the long run. Short sighted businesses are rarely successful.

They should just take away the Chinese tariffs at this point so BYD and Geely can come in and clean the US automakers out. Any idiot can see that a cheap EV or even hybrid is all people want, but no one wants to deliver it.

even if the EVs are cheap how will they be charged? Most people who can only afford lower priced cars won't own a home with a charger

For a small EV, charging overnight at 110v is plenty.

Yeah but with which 110V socket, from where? If you don't live at your own house and live at a rental apartment complex then you have no charging point at your parking space either way, be it 800V or 110V, until the building management or the city council decides to invest in EV charging infrastructure where you live and park your car.

What are you gonna do then, implement those Slav-Engineering™ solutions you see in Eastern Europe where EV owners run household AC extension outlets from their balcony window to their car parked in front of the commie-block? I mean, it works, but it's not legal to code everywhere and would get you in trouble in the more rigorous countries.

EVs are currently best suited to those who live in their own homes and can install their own chargers, or have chargers at work. Those without chargers at home are left holding the bags in the switch to EVs, hence why adoption is so slow.

Hey, my Slav neighbour charges his Model 3 that way!

Now, in all seriousness, EVs are for houses, not apartment buildings. If you have a driveway, and want an EV - by all means go for one.

But if you live in an apartment block where it's hard to even find parking after 7pm, then stick to ICE now.

I saw exactly that in my first apartment complex in Mountain View.

Is Mountain View the Eastern Europe of California? Is it run down and cheap?

It was decades ago, but now it's where Googlers live, and the apartment prices have gone up to match. I lived in an garden apartment complex built in the 1960s but recently renovated, with rents therefore somewhat elevated. The apartments nearby were of the same vintage but not remodeled, so were a little cheaper but much more run down and overcrowded by people trying not to be forced to move far away. This was the period where Mountain View implemented rent stabilization.

I mean, you just described what I am doing. It is always adrenaline to have a cable dangling from 4th floor in the thunderstorm.

And yes it is annoying PITA, and I am trying to sell the car, but surprisingly there is no demand for used 40-50k EUR Enyaq iv80 where I live.

Yeah, but 1.21 GW though...

Sorry for my ignorance but is not having a home charger a deal breaker for most people? I understand apartment buildings that it can be an issue, but for a private residence is it an issue?

No, it's not an issue to charge on a basic plug for most people. You can get 5 miles per hour on 120v. When charged overnight it is plenty for the average commute.

Yup. Several people have commented that they planned on installing an EVSE ("charger") when they bought an EV but never bothered after finding out that 120V was enough. 120V will let you empty the battery on the weekend, commute and errands during the week and then have a full battery by Friday.

I’m renting a car and using the chargers in front/near restaurants and the mall. 20 minutes of level 3 charging lasts me a day on a Kia Niro. This car is an ev conversion on a 260v architecture. It’s about 90 minutes from 20-90% at 50kWh charging. On a level 2 in the same area a four hour dinner with friends netted me 20kWh or about 1/4 of the battery.

So long as you have a meaningful reason to use public chargers you can get away without a charging space, but I definitely enjoy being able to charge my car at home.

It can be. Of the houses on my block, there are only two that have a garage. More than half don't even have a driveway. Even if you have a driveway, most are only big enough for one car; so, if you have two EVs, you're moving cars around to charge them. There is street parking on only one side of the street.

My neighborhood was laid out more than 125 years ago. The two houses on my east side were built in 1898, years before the Model T. By contrast, the neighborhood were I grew was mostly built post-WWII. Until a few new townhouses were built in the 1990s, only one didn't have a driveway.

So, just because you own a home, doesn't mean you have a space to charge an EV.

NIO are doing battery swaps: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNZy603as5w

I have neighbors just run extension cords from their front door or window across the sidewalk and plug into their car on the street.

> across the sidewalk

I reward the hacker spirit, however this is an accessibility concern for older people and wheelfolk.

I have seen some better hacks, like using (maybe even planting?) a small tree and running the charging cable over its branches and down to the curb - that way it isn't a trip hazard. Of course it'd be more practical to bury a small pipe under the sidewalk, I guess horizontal boring is pretty much a solved problem, so retrofitting one might not be too hard.

That works until electric cars get popular and people start stealing their electricity (plug their car charger to the 220 extension cord with "free" electricity on tap).

Guess you’re not in an HOA? There would certainly be complaints in my neighborhood if extension cords were running everywhere. Maybe there will be EV charging built infrastructure on day but not for now or the near term.

Just for a point of reference the BYD electric pickup with a smallish 85kWh battery pack and few features has a MRSP of about $32,000 US. There is zero chance it would qualify for the federal tax credit however, even if it were available in the US. Still, many vehicles are getting their tax credit cut in half next year due to stricter domestic sourcing rules.

I think domestic automakers underestimate the number of buyers who's first, second, and third priority is low price. They have all forgotten their origin as the company that sold the lowest price most mass market vehicle to people who couldn't previously afford them.

Price is king, but what kind of price? Americans have proven that labyrinthine financing and mortgage-length car loans are less of an obstacle, to the point that car MSRPs are essentially never advertised (outside of Tesla). Will the winner be the cheapest car, or the most profitable car with a 15 year mortgage?

> car MSRPs are essentially never advertised (outside of Tesla)

I just went to websites of Honda, Toyota and Mazda and every car prominently shows the MSRP.

Advertised, as in TV/web/radio. Always cost per month, by dealers. The MSRPs are published in easy to find places, but that's not how the average buyer approaches the transaction

I don't watch ads so I don't know if they show MSRP or not, but it is 2023, approximately everyone uses the internet as their first (possibly only) source of information.

Sure, but when 99% of buyers walk into a dealer to actually buy a vehicle, they're told, and they're negotiating, and their budget is all entirely based on monthly payments.

To a degree it doesn't even matter what the MSRP actually is... because of interest and financing and all the rest virtually nobody winds up paying that amount. (excluding cash buyers of course, which I'm assuming is a very, very low percentage of buyers).

The car could be $40k or $80k, it simply doesn't matter and the buyer doesn't even care. If they can't afford the monthlies, they won't buy. If they can, they will.

The point of the Chinese tariffs is precisely to prevent companies from BYD and Geely from killing American automakers with their cheap, low-quality cars.

(BYD, for example, is notorious for the abysmal quality of its electric busses, which are so bad that they're now effectively banned from consideration by most American public transit agencies. A SoCal agency bought several dozen busses a few years ago; only a single bus survived a year without major problems. Contrast that with their ICE or natural gas counterparts, which last decades.)

They are also heavily subsidised by the chinese government. If you think this through a bit you notice that you loose a war if you kill your national automakers and are dependant on china. Also look at Germany, they are still struggling, as they don't understand the market at all.

If they are so low quality, then let them in and let them fail in the marketplace. I don't think they are so bad. Fleet buses are basically a completely different business btw, that has really nothing to do with private car quality, and besides that, I have a hard time believing BYD buses can be so bad. Probably the SoCal place got an early generation but with the volume they are doing world wide, it's just nonsensical to think it's all garbage.

Manufacturing is tied to national security. Even if those cars are of terrible quality, the Chinese government can subsidize them (they already are) to the point they are valid competitors to normal quality cars. On the surface, this is a win to consumers as this would drive down prices and expand options. But to the US government, this would kill many automakers and factories and reduce national production capacity in time of war.

A very significant factor that allowed the US to completely dominate WW2 was its intact infrastructure and the resulting high manufacturing output. When you churn out ships and tanks in matter of days while your enemy, even with superior technology and quality, takes months to do so, you win. Japan's ships were incredibly well built but they lost the war because they can't replenish fast enough.

It's coming whether the Chinese tariffs go away or not. BYD is building a manufacturing plant in Mexico. Mexican built cars are tariff free.

There were people waiting for the Cybertruck pricing announcement; they were like "If the Cybertruck is actually $40K I'll get that, but otherwise I'll get a Lightning". Or "If they actually have a 500 mile Cybertruck I'll get that despite its looks".

Neither came true, so Ford is probably reducing production just as they get a bump in orders.

Exactly. Now, the lack of inventory will cause slow sales to become a self-fulfilling prophesy

This, plus, I'm not sure the F-150 was the right platform target to begin with. Maybe for commercial sales, but not necessarily for the general public. The F-150 Lightning is still a "big" truck, and the trim options actually available from dealerships all seem to be the most expensive ones. There are zero models within 100 miles of me at the base trim, and only one under $70,000, but dozens of everything-but-the-kitchen-sink trucks that are priced more like real estate than vehicles. All I want is a no-frills electric truck that I can go grab some boards from the local hardware store with. Instead I'm better off with a Ford Ranger that gets 26 MPG and putting the $50,000+ I saved into offsetting my carbon impact a different way.

Tesla screwed the pooch with the Cybertruck. The looks get crapped on a lot, but if they were selling those things for $40,000 people would have bought them anyway, especially if it qualified for the full federal tax credit. The $70,000 price point is an early Christmas gift to Ford and Rivian.

Mainly Rivian, based on this news.

And if Rivian, then all of the tire manufacturers as well!

I've been taking photos of Rivian front tires and it's comical how shredded they get while the rears look pristine.

I wanted the $40-50k Lightning. I called all of my dealers I've ever bought from. None of them had it. They had the $80-100k Lightnings.

The couple of people I know who got the base model got them through buying fleet trucks. I cannot afford to buy 5 trucks, I can't afford to buy 1 truck at the current prices.

Thankfully, my 2019 Ford Ranger is probably the closest to the perfect truck as I think I can get, big enough to handle 8 foot lumber, small enough to drive in any congested city (at least in America).

>"The news comes amid an industrywide pullback in EV investment due to slower-than-expected sales growth."

This slower-than-expected sales growth is primarily due to the higher-than-expected pricing increases across the board for EVs that are made by car companies that aren't 100% EV by design, as well as higher interest rates.

US EV sales growth is almost 40% this year. What kind of expectations did they have?

What kind of sales growth looked good to shareholders at the time*

They invested approximately $6 billion. Transferred Mustang brand to EVs. Ford made real investments and Monroe Live has rated Ford vehicles second best after Tesla and that is exactly the problem with EV market. Non-Tesla EVs suffer from lackluster sales is a known fact. Ford thought if they made investments they could succeed, and their initial release coincided with vehicle shortage so the early run inventory sold hot, but once market settled and early enthusiasm waned, the sales fell off the cliff.

I'm sure Ford is looking at total numbers, not percentages. They have invested significant resources in their EV division and the ICE division is apt for comparison.

After all, going from 1 to 2 sales is 100% growth!!!! /s

US EV sales are way up[0].

> Through the first nine months of the year, EV sales are up nearly 50 percent, already surpassing the full-year total for 2022.

Ford US EV sales are up but way less than 40%[1].

> Sales are up 16.2%. They’ve increased from 53,752 in the first 11 months of 2022 to 62,460 in the first 11 months of 2023.

[0] https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/electric-vehicles/chart...

[1] https://cleantechnica.com/2023/12/08/ford-ev-sales-up-43/

I have zero interest in ever buying a new vehicle again in having to interact with a dealership, particularly when every dealer now feels entitled to some random markup in price over MSRP. Despite Musk's cringe factor these days, I'll applaud Tesla for setting a bar in removing the sketchy dealers from reselling their cars and only sell directly.

There is little reason for automobile dealers to exist anymore if they're just going to sell at MSRP+dealer markup, there is no value add, they are merely parasitic. The whole point of going to a dealership used to be to get them UNDER MSRP as much as possible, which is how the racket worked. If I wanted to pay retail, I should just be able go to the Internet, pick options I want, and go pick it up when it shows up like a Tesla.

People should insist on removing the asinine legal requirement for dealers and modernize around the Internet, everyone's lives would be improved significantly other the parasite auto dealers. Remove the middlemen dealerships, get cheaper vehicles. Win Win.

Automobile dealers are simply something that should not exist anymore, and this becomes more true every day.

>when every dealer now feels entitled to some random markup in price over MSRP.

Well, for Ford, that's supposed to get you on the naughty list.

https://www.kbb.com/car-news/ford-ceo-warns-dealers-cut-the-...

What I remember about the F-150 Lightning is a reviewer's comment: "I don't know the point of an F-150 Lightning is."

https://archive.is/EX5aS

Unlike Tesla, which makes a profit on its EV's, most other EV makers lose money on every car. Losing money on every car when there are economic clouds approaching probably doesn't make the accounting department happy.

Are they? I haven't seen any numbers to back up that claim. Do you have any you can share? I know that Kia has been seeing record profits on the back of strong EV sales, but perhaps they're an outlier.

I watch a fair amount of automotive content on YouTube, and not being able to make a profit (yet) on EV's is a repeating theme for legacy automakers.

A quick search found this:

https://s201.q4cdn.com/693218008/files/doc_financials/2023/q...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/samabuelsamid/2022/11/17/gm-tar...

I think most EV buyers would prefer a Tesla to be honest. Better charging experience, better technology and better engineering.

I don't think the Lightning and Tesla customer base overlap that much.

They do, and those people bought a Rivian RT1.

Where I live (admittedly not representative of the entire country) I see a ton of non-tesla EVs, but they are all compact SUVs like the mach-e, vw id4, hyundai etc. Not many trucks other than that Rivian

Slow car sales in general is a thing, I think I read there's like 3 million brand new cars sitting in inventory, when the normal is less than a million

I've been wondering how people are affording cars as the average sale price has increased so dramatically. Perhaps the answer is that they are not. I'm sure holding onto my cheap beater of a car for as long as I can since no manufacturer seems to want to make that sort of vehicle any more.

I might afford one. The motivation is saving 250€ on petrol every month. And maybe saving on repairs I do now by myself on my driveway. But still €45k for used model Y performance or a new short range one is a lot. I keep my old failing car as long as I can.

It's true, but it's kinda like Android vs Apple a while ago. Tesla is selling the vast majority of vehicles with the vast majority of profit and charging stations (kinda like 3rd party accessories for an iPhone), and everything else is fragmented and not very profitable.

Better charging is the only one of those three where I think you could argue Tesla has the advantage.

Engineering seems like is becoming more problematic with time, and experience is mostly subjective, but also feels like is losing ground.

Charging is definitely better with Teslas for now, but the tide is starting to turn a bit here as well, on both sides: Superchargers are becoming compatible with CCS with the introduction of the Magic Dock, plus non-Tesla manufacturers are starting to use NACS.

Without proper parking sensors buying a €45k car (model Y) nowadays is a risky gamble. Closer to the dense cities parking by intuition can be dangerous - even simple white bumper repair goes for 500-700€ in not so reputable repair shop. Vision only failed badly and no solution in sight.

And now with all the stamped parts the insurers are going crazy. The cars after easy crash are basically thrash. Proper identification of damaged parts is very expensive and proper repair not worth it at the end anymore.

What's wrong with the parking sensors on your Y?

I was in one the other day, parking sensors worked fine.

Depends on what year it was. Tesla eliminated the ultrasonic sensors, moving to cameras completely.

https://www.tesla.com/support/transitioning-tesla-vision

It was this years. I'm unsure what makes them "improper", but they seem to work fine from my experience.

The cars delivered at the beginning of 2023 don’t have ultrasound sensors anymore. One can’t buy them from Tesla. And aftermarket solutions are ugly and/or with less sensors. This is an absolute show stopper for me.

Yep, I was in a 2023 delivered one. Have you tried it? I wouldn't call myself a parking sensor expert (or anything close), but they worked fine for me in multiple tight spots.

Good grief, how did people survive before sensors!!! They must have had to actually learn where their vehicles edges were or something!

Well it’s called “new car”. I can get a beater car from 2007 with all parking sensors and a rear view camera. I expect it from new vehicle. I don’t want to have a handicapped car which can’t leave parking spot where friendly people around parked their cars 3 inches away.

Bumper should still be a sacrificial part, if they parked that close they're taking the "parking by braille" penalty.

Better charging, yes, but I feel like many other models are better in measurable ways. I drive an EV6, so I'm biased, but things like V2L, CarPlay, ventilated seats, etc, are all great options that I couldn't get in the Model 3. Add in reputational things like build quality and none of the headline-grabbers like AutoPilot or FSD failures. (There are some things I envy in the Model 3, but overall, I feel it's a well balanced car)

wow the demographic who buy giant F-150 trucks don't want EVs, what a shock

That’s what I’m wondering. Are slow sales happening across the board? Or is it focused on segments where “traditional EV buyers” tend not to shop?

The F-150 Lightning was the same size

I don't think driving a truck means that you're necessarily against EVs. The Rivian is proof that truck buyers do want EVs. Ultimately a truck has to provide utility. The Lightning just doesn't offer enough utility for the price.

I initially put down a deposit on the Lightning, but then the price got jacked up multiple times. And there were quality issues, and the towing range was terrible, and the charging network was subpar. It's not surprising that Ford is having to cut production.

Are those "truck buyers who bought an EV" or "EV buyers who bought a truck"?

I feel like the primary issue is the charging network and range. Tesla makes up for its lack of range with an extremely robust network. It doesn't seem like Ford is doing anything to reassure customers they will be able to charge their truck while on a road trip. Americans love to drive. You can get a ICE F-150 with a 35 gallon fuel tank, which will get you 500 miles of highway range. If you tell someone that the Lightning will only get 200 miles of range on the highway, generally they will find that amusing and make some sort of comment about how they don't want the government to force them to buy electric vehicles.

Ford was the first to switch to Tesla's NACS. That was a very robust response IMO.

Yes good move, but you can't buy any Ford vehicles with NACS currently. Its supposed to go into effect in 2025 afaik.

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