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Comment by charlesabarnes | Hacker News Reader

Wow, I was under the impression that these were selling incredibly well.

I started to appreciate Ford's strategy recently after they lost my faith after they killed off sedans in the US. I'm now confused again by the company's strategy

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As with all but a few EV manufactures [1], they were losing money each sale ( >$30k)[2].

[1] https://www.carscoops.com/2025/03/only-four-ev-brands-are-pr...

[2] https://www.theautopian.com/ford-lost-36000-for-every-electr...

The only two car companies to make any meaningful profit on EVs were founded as EV companies first?

That’s not that surprising. It’s very hard to make elephants dance.

If that remains true it means all these auto companies will be dead in 25 years, or eternally strung along on government support.

If there were no tariffs or other market barriers I get the impression that BYD would bulldoze the entire world and there would be one car maker with >80% of the market.

This video here describes why BYD is so competitive: They have done a splendid job vertically integrating as much as they can to get the price down. This $11,500 EV is an excellent example of how other companies should start to shift their thinking.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izvdO-zdlKg

How much does it sell for in Europe? Does it meet US safety requirements?

Seems like it is sold for around 18,000 Euros. It obviously passed European safety standards, no point in getting homologation certification for the US if it remains tariffed to high hell but if they wanted to I'd assume they can pass US standards as well.

Yeah, the problem is that the tariffs are letting our carmakers just become unproductive, uncompetitive leeches on the American consumer. They're getting lapped by China/BYD.

Once BYD bulldozes the rest of the world, our domestic manufacturers are guaranteed to fail.

100% on BYD ... no one can match their current technology and pricing power. And it's possible they still will do that bulldozing, but much more slowly. Even now I'm seeing strong swapping out of Tesla's for BYD's in London.

They were not losing money on each sale, that's silly. Your article is counting the entire EV R&D budget and extrapolating. For every Lightning they sold, the margins improved. They just did not sell enough of them to make the overall venture profitable.

Well sure, but that's the only possible way to lose money: costs are more than profit from sales. See "profit margin". R&D is a cost that can't be avoided. In this case, that cost was so much more that they're cancelling the program.

Sales drove off a cliff. The larger problem is that Ford has lost multiples of tens of billions trying to do EV's.

> Ford has lost multiples of tens of billions trying to do EVs.

To the observer, Ford has done nothing right in recent years except to build combustion F150s for US buyers.

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