Ford's $35.1 Billion EV Fiasco

Felony stupid in Dearborn.

Why does this man still have a job? In 2023, Ford CEO Jim Farley drove a Ford Lightning as part of a publicity stunt to promote the company’s EVs. Photo credit: Russ Mitchell, Los Angeles Times

Electric vehicles are the Next Big Thing, and they always will be.

More proof of that hits the streets today when Ford Motor Company announced it would take a $19.5 billion charge due to its headlong rush to build EVs. As the Wall Street Journal noted, “The sum is among the largest impairments taken by a company and marks the US auto industry’s biggest reckoning to date that it can’t realize its electric-vehicle ambitions anytime soon.”

Anytime soon? How about never? Does never work for you?

In May, after Ford reported a first-quarter loss of $849 million on its EVs, I wrote that the company sold “about 19 times more conventional vehicles than EVs.” I continued:

While the per-vehicle losses in the first quarter were an improvement over last year’s numbers, the EV business has been nothing short of disastrous for the Dearborn-based auto giant. In 2022, Ford lost $2.2 billion on EVs. In 2023, it lost $4.7 billion. In 2024, it lost $5.1 billion (compared to net income of $5.9 billion).

Through the first three quarters of 2025, Ford’s EV losses have totaled $3.6 billion. Thus, since 2022, the company’s EV losses have totaled $15.6 billion. Add in the write down of $19.5 billion, and the cost of this colossal blunder comes out to $35.1 billion! For reference, since 2022, Ford’s net income has totaled $11.1 billion. Put another way, since 2022, Ford’s losses on its EVs are more than three times the amount it made in profit!

The losses aren’t just financial. The company also announced that all 1,600 employees at its new battery plant in Glendale, Kentucky, will be laid off. It’s not clear how many of those workers will be rehired as the facility is converted to make batteries for data centers and utility applications. Furthermore, given cutthroat competition from existing battery giants such as CATL, BYD, LG, Panasonic, and others, it’s not clear how Ford will ever make money in that business.

In an article headlined, “Ford Takes $19.5 Billion Hit in Detroit’s Biggest EV Bust,” the Journal’s Sharon Terlep had some peachy quotes from the company’s CEO, Jim Farley. “Instead of plowing billions into the future knowing these large EVs will never make money, we are pivoting,” Farley said. “We now know enough about the US market where we have a lot more certainty in this second inning” of reduced-emissions powertrains. He also told the Journal that the company was planning a new low-cost EV strategy, and that “We’ve got to land the plane.”

Land the plane? Dude! Your entire EV strategy, the strategy you were in charge of, just crashed and burst into flames, and the bill for the damage is, checks notes…$35.1 billion! And yet, you say you have “got to land the plane.” Wiley Post could have done a better job.

In an interview on Bloomberg, Farley said that dumping its EV business will be “profit positive” for Ford. Gee, ya think? Credit: Bloomberg

The hard truth is that Ford, which makes its money by selling F-150s and other trucks, didn’t understand who its customers are. As I explained in testimony to the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee in January 2024, EVs have always been a niche-market product, not a mass-market one. And that niche market is dominated by wealthy, white, male, liberal voters who live in a handful of heavily Democratic cities and counties. I wrote:

Further, that niche market is primarily defined by class and ideology. Some 57% of EV owners earn more than $100,000 annually, 75% are male, and 87% are white. Last March, Gallup reported, “a substantial majority of Republicans, 71%, say they would not consider owning an electric vehicle.”

Last October, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, released a remarkable study that found “counties with affluent left-leaning cities” like Cambridge, San Francisco, and Seattle “play a disproportionately large role in driving the entire national increase in EV adoption.” The researchers found that over the past decade, about half of all the EVs sold in the U.S. were sold in the most heavily Democratic counties in the country. The summary of the study deserves quoting at length: 

“The prospect for EVs as a climate change solution hinges on their widespread adoption across the political spectrum. In this paper, we use detailed county-level data on new vehicle registrations from 2012-2022 to measure the degree to which EV adoption is concentrated in the most left-leaning U.S. counties. The results point to a strong and enduring correlation between political ideology and U.S. EV adoption. During our time period about half of all EVs went to the 10% most Democratic counties, and about one-third went to the top 5%. There is relatively little evidence that this correlation has decreased over time, and even some specifications that point to increasing correlation. The results suggest that it may be harder than previously believed to reach high levels of U.S. EV adoption.” (Emphasis added.)

Ford is a historic company. It spends millions per year on market research. And yet, Farley and his colleagues didn’t understand their market, and that lack of understanding has cost the company $35 billion. Ford’s EV disaster will go down as one of the biggest fiascos in modern automobile history.

I’ve asked before, and I’ll ask again: Why does Jim Farley still have a job?

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