Jim Farley has doubled-down on his comments last year about Americans needing to break their "monster" car addition.
In summer 2024, the Ford boss acknowledged that American consumers are in “love with these monster vehicles” but said they need to “get back in love” with small cars. “We have to start to get back in love with smaller vehicles. It’s super important for our society and for EV adoption,” Farley said.
Now, he's putting that warning into practice at Ford. According to InsideEVs, Ford CEO Jim Farley recently made an ominous (for some) statement on the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call. “For larger retail, electric utilities, the economics are unresolvable. These customers have very demanding use cases for an electric vehicle. They tow, they go off-road, they take long road trips. These vehicles have worse aerodynamics, and they're very heavy, which means very large and expensive batteries.” He went on to say that the blue oval would focus on small to medium-sized electric vehicles that present a stronger economic case.
Conventional wisdom says an EV will always be more efficient than a gas-powered car of the same size, but they pale in comparison to smaller EVs, says AutoBlog. Measuring the efficiency of an EV is based on what’s known as miles per kilowatt-hour of electricity. Near 4 miles per kWh is pretty good, and EVs like the Tesla Model Y achieve that. Move up to something like a giant Hummer EV, and it drops to a mere 1.5 miles per kilowatt-hour of electricity. The bigger and heavier EVs require bigger batteries to achieve similar ranges as their smaller counterparts.
As other automakers backpedal their once aggressive EV plans, they must simultaneously reassess what types of EVs they will pursue. Many automobile manufacturers had once planned to go electric across all segments, but now the formula seems to be broken for larger, more expensive EVs that don’t seem to draw large numbers of customers.
Whatever way you look at it, that's good news for the planet.