In case you missed it, Ford Motor Company reported this week that it somehow managed to lose an impressive $132,000 per EV sold during Q1 2024. That is almost double the per-unit loss the company reported in Q2 2023, as calculated by our friend Robert Bryce.
That is not a typo, and I swear I am not making it up. Hell, even the Biden propagandists over at CNN have noticed the carnage at Ford caused by CEO Jim Farley’s incessant EV virtue-signaling and seemingly insatiable seeking of government rents.
Here’s an excerpt from that story:
Ford’s electric vehicle unit reported that losses soared in the first quarter to $1.3 billion, or $132,000 for each of the 10,000 vehicles it sold in the first three months of the year, helping to drag down earnings for the company overall.
Ford, like most automakers, has announced plans to shift from traditional gas-powered vehicles to EVs in coming years. But it is the only traditional automaker to break out results of its retail EV sales. And the results it reported Wednesday show another sign of the profit pressures on the EV business at Ford and other automakers.
The EV unit, which Ford calls Model e, sold 10,000 vehicles in the quarter, down 20% from the number it sold a year earlier. And its revenue plunged 84% to about $100 million, which Ford attributed mostly to price cuts for EVs across the industry. That resulted in the $1.3 billion loss before interest and taxes (EBIT), and the massive per-vehicle loss in the Model e unit.
[End]
Note the fact - which I’ve highlighted - that Ford’s EV revenue was down 84% from the previous quarter due not only from plummeting sales, but also from deep price discounts. Those deep price discounts were required due to falling demand, which in turn resulted in huge inventories of unsold cars sitting not only at Ford’s plants but also in the lots of its hundreds of dealers around the country.
Note also the highlighted part about Ford being the only legacy carmaker that is brave - or perhaps a better word is ‘stupid’ - enough to break out its EV results as a separate line item in its quarterly results. Thus, while GM reported fairly strong results for Q1 this week, we can’t know how big its own EV-related losses are. GM did give us a clue when it said its quarterly profit was a result of ongoing strong demand not for EVs, but for its legacy internal combustion pickups and SUVs.
Oh.
Even before it announced these terrible results, Ford and Farley said in early April that it was shifting its strategic vision away from all-electric cars to introducing a new line of hybrid models going forward. Carney and his team had better hope the company’s board and investors are willing to swallow the folly they’ve already created with their EV virtue-signaling disaster, and wait to see if they do any better by basically playing copy cat to Toyota.
That is all.
Maybe Ev market price will go negative like the price of oil did a few years back. If they actually paid me to take a few off their hands, I would consider the offer. After all scrap metal has some value.
Hilarious in conjunction with an interview with a Chinese official I watched this morning. He refuted Blinken's claims that China had an over capacity of EVs, but then (this is the funny part) he said earnestly and soberly that the US should follow China's lead and go 100% EV in the next few years. Now when CHINA is telling us to do something, I'm pretty sure we should do the opposite.