Ford is off to a great start – not just electrically: The billion dollar thing in Dearborn

The Channel 56 presenter can’t stop raving. “I’m basically a Jeep guy – like my whole family,” he cheers through the country airwaves, “but this Bronco is just a great thing. Who doesn’t want it?” Exactly – who doesn’t want that? The delivery times for the new Ford Bronco are endless – more than a year and easily bidding between $80,000 and $100,000 for one of these gray market SUVs that cost half that per se. Since no one can keep up with the exception of the Mercedes G-Class – since the waiting times are now almost two years. Ford is in and how. The stock market value rose above the magic 100 billion dollar mark for the first time last week. The competition still looks a bit irritated, but most of them have now understood that the Blue Oval from Dearborn / Michigan is once again a big player and is heavily involved.

Once again, because company CEO Jim Farley can now reap what his predecessors initiated. It’s being celebrated now, but the important decisions in the right direction have already been made by Mark Fields and Jim Hackett. Of course Ford is going electric and in the USA everyone is already waiting with high voltage for the F-150 Lightning. It could become an absolute “game changer”, as the Americans call it, if the tide turns completely. For four decades, the Ford F-150 and its heavy-duty siblings have been the undisputed best-sellers in the United States. “Even here in Colorado, the demand is much greater than we would have expected,” says a large Ford dealer from Denver, “otherwise the electric cars are having a harder time here than in other regions because we’re having a long and hard winter have a lot of snow.”

Musk himself is not able to keep up with the widely announced Tesla pick-up and, in parallel with the success stories from Dearborn, has had to report again and again that the electric pick-up is being pushed further back. This was already presented at the end of 2019 and should roll onto the market in 2022. There are now more than 200,000 pre-orders for the electric F-150 Lightning. How quickly production can be ramped up in view of the semiconductor problems, which in 2021 caused the mass model F-150 in particular to crash in terms of volume, is another topic. Mass production is not expected until the second half of 2022 at the earliest, and many customers won’t get their F-150 Lightning until mid-2023, according to the Colorado Auto Mile Ford dealer to get more F-150 Lightning trucks into the hands of our customers,” said Kumar Galhotra, President of Ford’s The Americas & International Markets Group, “The reality is clear: people are ready for an all-electric F- 150 and Ford is pulling out all the stops to scale our operations and increase production capacity.”

The F-150 has been selling so successfully for four decades not least because it not only appeals to private customers but also to traders. So it’s no surprise that the F-150 Lightning is also offered as a so-called “work horse” under the title Lightning Pro. The base price for the Ford F-150 Lightning Pro with a standard battery, electric four-wheel drive, 426 hp and a maximum range of 370 kilometers on one battery charge is just under 40,000 US dollars. For $10,000 more, you get 563 hp, a range of 480 kilometers and improved equipment. “Ford is on an ambitious path to leading the electrification revolution – from being the only American automaker to have sided with California to tighten greenhouse gas emissions, to electrifying our most iconic and beloved vehicles, like the F- 150 Lightning, the Mustang Mach-E and the E-Transit,” said Ford CEO Jim Farley, “customer demand has exceeded our expectations. As such, we believe we are well positioned to achieve 40 to 50 percent of our sales by 2030 Focus US sales on all-electric vehicles.”

But the gap is far from being caught up. Tesla delivered more than 936,000 vehicles last year, an 87.4 percent increase from 499,550 in 2020. The analysts recently calculated that CEO Elon Musk’s company will not only exceed the million mark this year, but will also be able to celebrate growth of another 65 percent with more than 1.5 million new vehicles. Ford, on the other hand, wants to invest more than $30 billion in electric vehicles by 2025; a lot of money, but significantly less than some other European corporations such as Volkswagen or Daimler. Nevertheless, Ford wants to become the clear number two behind Tesla in the next two years, at least in the USA, and then challenge the stock market darling in the fight for the crown. By the end of 2024, Ford plans to produce more than 600,000 electric vehicles per year worldwide.

But Ford is so successful not least because there is more than the F-150 and a purely electric strategy. Because while everyone seems to be looking forward to the F-150 Lightning, the long-running Mustang creates an image just as much as the Bronco, which Ford also provided with the Bronco Sport, which is also a pretty SUV. The car manufacturer from Dearborn also expects tailwinds in Europe, even if the US models are still lacking in glamor. In the medium term, however, the Bronco and F-150, based on the Mustang and Explorer models, should – at least electrically – make the leap across the Atlantic. One hit is the Ford Mustang Mach-E, which can only be confused by its name, because the electric SUV has about as much to do with a Mustang as it does with the successful 1980s Ford Sierra model. Its production capacity is to increase to 200,000 vehicles by the middle of next year. Incidentally, Ford is indirectly attached to the electric start-up Rivian, where it has gradually increased its own stake to twelve percent. The manufacturer of electric pickups and SUVs brought its first 1,000 vehicles to selected customers at the turn of the year, but is being celebrated by investors, the stock market and the automotive industry, so that memories of the Tesla launch come up here too.