Over the past few years, Ford has invested billions in electrification, with a goal of meeting what it believed was going to be tremendous demand for EVs in the near future. Things haven’t quite panned out as expected in that regard, and the company’s Vice Chair, John Lawler, recently called those big financial commitments “a mistake.” Now, FoMoCo has pivoted to focusing on smaller, cheaper EVs moving forward, but the future of those models depends largely on declining EV battery costs. Turns out, that hasn’t really happened yet, either.
“But the other thing that proved to be an error state was everybody thought battery costs were going to come down dramatically,” Lawler said at the the Bank of America Securities 2025 Automotive Summit. “What was it, that we’d be at what? Roughly by ‘26, $50 kilowatt-hour for a pack? We’re nowhere close to that.”
“So, as we started to pivot and we went with the advanced development center, we started to look at where we would play in electrification, and we concluded it with small and medium-sized utilities and pickup trucks. And the reason why is because those smaller form factors require a smaller battery. So, these large vehicles with these huge batteries at the cost of the electrification today for the battery, the kilowatt-hour, they just don’t work.”
As Lawler notes here, Ford is currently focused on smaller pickups and SUVs in regard to developing future EVs, which CEO Jim Farley considers to be the “sweet spot” at the moment, and the automaker also opted to cancel the development of a pair of three-row EV SUVs recently. In the meantime, Ford continues to focus on EV battery development, and recently, it achieved a breakthrough in regard to its Lithium Manganese Rich (LMR) battery chemistry. Set to be used in its upcoming EVs, the LMR chemistry will be scaled and integrated into production vehicles before the end of the current decade.
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