The News
Ford announced Monday it is cutting the price of its electric pickup truck, the F-150 Lightning, by between $6,000 and $10,000 depending on the model.
Ford previously hiked the price of the truck four times starting in April 2022, with the least expensive model going from about $40,000 to nearly $60,000. With the latest cut, it now goes for just under $50,000. The automative maker said it was able to make the price cuts because of factory improvements and cheaper materials.
It marks the latest development in the struggle to dominate the electric car market, after rival Tesla also recently announced a price drop. Here’s what experts and analysts make of it.
Insights
- Tesla started a “price war” a few months ago when it dropped the starting price of its Model Y car, Reuters reported. It’s a sign that while the market is growing, the supply of electric vehicles might be exceeding demand. EVs have been ”stacking up at some automakers’ dealerships.”
- Tesla, meanwhile, recently heralded the building of its first electric Cybertruck at a factory in Texas, about two years behind schedule. After Ford announced its price drop, “the market is really freaking out because they see this as Ford chasing Tesla, especially in light of Cybertruck production starting,” David Whiston, an analyst with Morningstar Inc, said. “But this is straight out of the Tesla playbook of starting high and coming down as they got more scale.” — Bloomberg
- Tesla hasn’t yet released the pricing for the Cybertruck, but CEO Elon Musk implied in a tweet Monday that it may be cheaper than Ford’s F-150 Lightning which he found to be “somewhat expensive.”
- Ford and other legacy automakers are now trying to reinvent themselves “to compete in an era of electrification and software-defined vehicles,” The Economist wrote last month. Ford CEO Jim Farley admits that “Tesla has influenced a lot of our thinking,” though he is also aware of the ways their position is different than Tesla’s. Like Musk, Farley has brought more of Ford’s supply chain in-house, and is looking at ways to simplify the manufacturing process.
