Ford Is Doing What Has To Be Done — Leading On EVs And Innovating Are Imperative – CleanTechnica

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Last Updated on: 20th August 2025, 12:05 am

As you probably know by now, Ford came out with a big new EV plan last week. CEO Jim Farley started off the announcement like this:

“Nearly 120 years ago, the Ford Model T became the ‘Universal Car.’ Why? It was affordable, adaptable, and serviceable. America would never be the same.

“Now, we’re ushering in the next chapter with the Ford Universal EV Platform — a new idea for a new era.”

The company says it is investing billions of dollars into advanced manufacturing, EV batteries, and a whole new vehicle platform in Kentucky and Michigan. It is all about creating affordable, competitive electric vehicles. Michael Barnard has a great piece (as usual) diving deeper into this plan and the risks associated with it, as well as trying to determine where the plan originated and whether it makes sense to go forward with it in an anti-EV Trump era.

The discussion got me thinking. Well, the initial announcements got me thinking, but this piece from Michael just inspired more thinking. The question — and point — is: how else should Ford approach the future?

Let’s roll through a handful of points here that I think feed into this plan from Ford:

• Electric vehicle technology is constantly coming down in cost.
• At the moment, even though total cost of ownership of electric vehicles often beats total cost of ownership of similar gas-powered vehicles, many people are turned off by the upfront prices of many electric vehicles (even though there are also some quite affordable EV models now).
• Over in China, though, in addition to the tech improving rapidly (more rapidly than in the US), EV costs have come down enormously as scale has grown. You can get stunningly good EVs at very low costs. (Note that Jim Farley has been looking at this closely for at least a couple of years.)
• It seems inevitable that electric vehicles will get cheaper than gas-powered vehicles in the US in coming years. With that in mind, as well as the above, is there any option but to try to lead in the cost cutting? Is there any option but to try to lead in the fast-innovating EV market?

Legacy automakers love to talk about weak EV demand and make excuses for not producing EVs at higher scale and selling more EVs. We’ve all written about that at length. Perhaps they believe that the market isn’t ready for EVs, but the bigger factor is probably that they don’t want to throw away their investments in gasoline engine IP, manufacturing lines, their service departments, their supply chains, and their overall business and profits. For the most part, we see and complain about foot dragging from these automakers.

This is not foot dragging. This is a bold move by Ford that may well have been influence by policies passed by Biden and Democrats (that Ford perhaps thought Trump and Republicans would not kill), but I think it was made more so by Farley and team’s observations of how the auto market is evolving in China and Europe, and the realization that if they don’t lead the US market in this field going forward, they could well be eaten alive.

This is not a small or inconsequential announcement. It is definitely going to be one of Ford’s biggest announcements of the year — probably it’s biggest. The company is reaching back to and referencing its iconic, world-changing Model T. That’s no small thing.

Really, I don’t think Ford would have done all this and made these plans without taking into account the possibility of Republicans repealing EV subsidies. I think the company just knows that EVs are the future, the industry is rapidly innovating elsewhere, and this is what Ford needs to do in order to be at the forefront of the US auto market in the coming decade.