Pausing the factory

Ford is idling the factory where it makes its F-150 Lightning electric pickup trucks until next year, the company said today. It’s another unwelcome hiccup in Ford’s path to becoming a global EV producer.

The plan is to shut things down after the last shift on Friday, November 15th, at which point the plant will be closed for seven weeks, including holidays in which no work would have occurred anyway. The reasons are a bit vague, with Ford spokesperson Emma Berg citing a need to “adjust production for an optimal mix of sales growth and profitability.”

That last word — profitability — is surely driving most of this decision. While Tesla just had a better-than-expected earnings quarter, Ford is still struggling to squeeze profit out of its Model e division, which covers EVs, software, and more.

The company reported losing $1.2 billion during the third quarter of this year on Model e, and projects that it will lose $5 billion on its EV business for the whole year. The company cited “industrywide pricing pressure” as among the reasons for the losses.

When it first came out, the F-150 Lightning was held up as enormously important for Ford’s long-term growth and vision. An electrified version of the world’s most popular pickup truck, and America’s most popular vehicle? Obviously Ford was going to print money on this model.

But the Lightning has had a rocky start. Prices have been slashed, production paused and restarted, and dealership inventory has remained a sticking point. The Tesla Cybertruck, that low poly lightning rod of praise and ridicule, recently outpaced the F-150 Lightning (and truly every electric truck on the market) in sales.

The last time Ford idled the plant was to increase its size to expand production. The company anticipated making 70,000 trucks a year in the newly enlarged factory. As of this most recent quarter, Ford has delivered 22,807 Lightnings.

The company is likely to keep running into these challenges as it scrambles to develop a next-generation EV platform to that is more low-cost than its current one. Ford has a “skunkworks” team in Silicon Valley developing this new platform right now. But in the meantime, it needs to sell more F-150 Lightnings.