Growing demand for EVs forces Ford to temporarily stop F-150 Lightning production due to shortage of batteries
Ford Motor will stop making its F-150 Lightning electric pickup truck until at least February 24 because the battery needs to be fixed.
This week, a Michigan automaker found a possible battery problem during a pre-delivery quality check and started looking into why. Ford said it doesn’t know of any problems with batteries in cars that are already on the road.
Ford spokeswoman Emma Bergg told CBS MoneyWatch on Wednesday, “We think we’ve found the root cause of this problem.” “By the end of next week, we plan to finish our investigation and use what we’ve learned to improve the way the truck’s batteries are made.”
Bergg said it “could take a few weeks” to use this method.
“We will keep holding on to vehicles that have already been made while we work on engineering and process updates,” she said.
Ford’s F-150 Lightning went on sale last year. Ford’s plan to sell 600,000 Lightning trucks in 2023 is in danger because of the stop in production.
Ford has sold 15,617 electric trucks since they came out last May, according to the most up-to-date company data. In October, the company sold 2,436, which was the most it had ever sold in one month.
Soaring demand for EVs
Ford is putting a lot of money into building a new plant for the F-150 Lightning, which has already been named the 2023 MotorTrend Truck of the Year.
When the truck was first announced by the company in 2021, the list of people who wanted to pre-order it quickly grew to more than 100,000 in just three weeks. A new plant in Dearborn, Michigan is where the car is being made.
Ford is taking a break just as interest and demand for electric cars in the U.S. keep going up. A survey by the auto club AAA found that about a quarter of Americans want to buy an electric car when they buy their next car. A company that studies the car industry called Recurrent found that the number of people interested in buying an electric car has gone up by 70% since January.
In October, Ford raised the price of the F-150 Lightning to try to make up for rising costs of making the car. Other automakers, like Rivian, GM, and Tesla, also raised the prices of their EV lines because of rising metal prices and higher costs for parts like lithium, which is used to make batteries.
Ford announced earlier this month that it made $1.3 billion in the fourth quarter of 2022, which is about 89% less than the same time last year. In a call about earnings this month, CEO Jim Farley said that he was disappointed with Ford’s performance in 2022 because “it could have been so much more for us at Ford.”
On Wednesday, Ford’s stock price dropped nearly 1%, to about $12.80 per share. This was the second day in a row that it went down.
