Ford is doubling electrification investments by 2025

Ford wants to almost double its investments in the electrification of its vehicles to at least 22 billion US dollars by 2025. This was announced by the US carmaker when announcing the new business figures.

In addition to the 22 billion dollars (about 18.4 billion euros), Ford plans to invest seven billion dollars (5.85 billion euros) in autonomous driving. “The transformation of Ford is happening and so is our leadership of the EV revolution and development of autonomous driving.,” said Ford CEO Jim Farley. “We’re now allocating a combined $29 billion in capital and tremendous talent to these two areas, and bringing customers high-volume, connected electric SUVs, commercial vans and pickup trucks.”

Farley did not announce specific models or technologies, however. There will be an acceleration of “all our plans”, the Ford CEO said. “breaking constraints, increasing battery capacity, improving costs and getting more electric vehicles into our product cycle plan.”

So far, Ford is building the Mustang Mach-E electric SUV in Mexico, expanding its Michigan plant to produce an electric F-150 from 2022, and will build the E-Transit in Missouri from late 2021 (for Europe, the E-Transit will be assembled in Turkey). In addition, two plants in Canada will be retooled, where electric SUVs for the Lincoln brand are to be built from 2024. However, they will be built on their own, not together with Rivian as announced under Farley’s predecessor Hackett. In addition, Ford announced a few days ago that the Mustang Mach-E will also be built in China for the local market.

Some observers, however, see Ford’s investment announcement as a flight to the front, because with its current business Ford has slipped deep into the red: for the fourth quarter alone, the carmaker reported a loss of 2.8 billion dollars (2.34 billion euros).

Other figures that Ford has now published show how great the need to catch up is: although the Mustang Mach-E was already presented in 2019 and promoted via several roadshows in the course of 2020, production is not yet in full swing. In January, 4,250 units of the electric SUV were built, bringing the total to around 11,000 so far. Around 5,000 have been delivered to dealers, but only 241 had been delivered to customers by the end of January – including just three vehicles in December 2020 and 238 units in January.

insideevs.com, electrek.co, ford.com (investment), insideevs.com, ford.com (deliveries)