Ford talks plans for Tesla-rivalling 7-seat electric crossover
CEO Jim Farley says the five-seat EV SUV space is “overcapacity,” and so plans to beat rivals with a bigger battery-powered brute
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The five-seat electric SUV is dead. Long live the seven-seat electric SUV! Well, maybe it’s not quite that black-and-white a situation, but shortly after cutting prices by thousands of dollars on its Mustang Mach-E, Ford has made clear where it plans to expand within the electric SUV market. As per usual, things are getting bigger.
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Speaking to analysts during the company’s first-quarter earning results report, Ford CEO Jim Farley said they saw the writing on the wall for the five-seat Mach-E, itself a player in a segment dominated by the Tesla Model Y. “We could see the overcapacity in the two-row electric utility segment years ago,” he said, going on to outline how Ford anticipates there will be 45 options in the electric five-seat compact and mid-size SUV segments in just two years.
“In contrast to two-row crossovers that we believe will be a very saturated market, we believe Model E can be highly differentiated in markets where we know the customer well, like the three-row utility space,” Farley said.
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Farley also said he anticipates the expanding of the EV product range will welcome new customers. “A lot of new customers bought a Lightning that never owned a pick-up truck before,” he said. “And we intend to do that with a three-row crossover and with a bunch of EV Pro vehicles.”
Ford plans to reveal more on the electric seven-seater, plus upcoming commercial EV products, at an investor day planned for the end of May.
The 2023 Q1 earnings results included a US$700-million loss for the Model E electric division, almost double the US$400-million loss posted in Q1 of 2022. According to Farley, Ford will take a page out of Tesla’s recent playbook and further reduce the Mach-E’s build cost by 86-ing elements that its software says owners are usually overlooking anyway. “If they’re not using something that we have on the vehicle, we can design that out,” he said.