this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2025
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I mean it's Trump that removed their entire market. People don't buy EVs unless there's legislative pressure being built on ICE emissions.
Not that Ford couldn't have handled this with more grace of course... But I honestly doubt they were happy about the idea of building an entire plant and then shutting it down
EVs can be much cheaper than petrol, depending on how much you drive and how much you spend on petrol or power.
Okay, so let me preface this by saying that I'm not necessarily arguing but just doing the math for my own country just because it's fun. It's also not super precise.
If you drive a lot, you'd be buying diesel not petrol. Usually. But that's just me nitpicking, I assume you mean ICEs in general.
It depends on your region too. In some, EVs are so much cheaper to run it's not funny, in some they're comparable.
In my country, if you choose the correct power company for home electricity, a public charger during daytime is 0.333€/kWh. If you use a cheaper power company at home, you pay 0.37€/kWh at the biggest chain of public chargers. This of course assumes you use the cheaper, <=100 kW chargers. Faster ones are more expensive so we'll just pretend they don't exist. Charging at home varies from 0.05 to 5€/kWh if you have a variable rate package or if you lock yourself in to a price it's probably around 0.15 if you locked in a few years ago for a long period, or 0.2 if you lock in now. This is including the transmission fees and everything.
So let's say bare minimum 0.15 unless you want to time it by hour, and maximum 0.33 because most people aren't stupid and unplug their shit when the prices skyrocket for an hour or 2, so realistically home charging SHOULD always be cheaper than public charging.
An MB EQE sedan will do roughly 20 kWh/100km driving on a highway at 120km/h with AC and stuff on - normal driving, not super eco, but also not very wasteful. That can be anywhere between 3 euros per 100 km (VERY cheap compared to ICE) and 6.6 EUR per 100 km. Comparable E-Class diesel sedan or wagon will do 4.5-5 l/100km these days at same speeds, so 6€ per 100 km at the fuel price I got last time, 4€ at the best price I can get, or 7 for the worst prices seen this year.
Let's assume you have a great electricity price locked in and you only ever charge at home, and that fuel prices go back up and stay there. This is a 4€ difference in the price for 100 km, in the EV's favor. A huge difference tbh. But the price difference for cheapest EQE and cheapest diesel E-Class is 10k in favor of the diesel. At this price difference, it takes 250k km for the power savings to pay off. A lot of these cars get sold off before the first owner even reaches that mileage.
This math changes significantly with used cars, though. Cheapest BMW i4 I could find is 43k for a 2023. Cheapest diesel 4 series is 40k (and has more kilometers actually). At 3k price difference it takes only 75k km to pay off the difference assuming similar efficiency ratings for both, I cba to look it up. I wanted to do i5 and 5 series, but the i5s are so new they haven't really depreciated yet.
And if you use public chargers exclusively, well, it'll essentially never pay off at current prices. But that could change in the future.
Another thing to consider, though, is that here you're not really getting a "driver's car" with the ICE. Diesels are work horses and inline 4s particularly aren't anything special. The EVs, both the Mercedes and BMW, have significantly more power. You kinda get more for your money there, I was just doing a purely financial comparison, while keeping to German cars because that's pretty much all I drive usually (may be changing this though, I'm eyeing a hybrid Lexus as my stepping stone car between my diesel A6 and whatever EV I'll buy when my finances have recovered from a shitty marriage)
You are comparing expensive German cars with expensive German power prices. If you look at at cheap used Nissan leaf and pay half of that for power, then the only argument for petrol is the range which you don't have on old and cheap EVs.
Trump may have put a small speedbump in the path, but Ford could have absolutely pushed forward with promoting EVs if they wanted to. People do buy EVs even without incentives, and car companies have been telling people what their preferences are the whole time.
Enthusiasts (and occasionally virtue signalers) buy EVs without incentives. Average person doesn't want to pay extra for an EV.
This IMO holds true for some other things going on in the car industry. The annoying large touch screens in particular. But not people wanting ICE vehicles which tend to be more affordable
People are blowing massive amounts of money on giant overpriced trucks, which also cost a lot more in the long run because of fuel costs vs charging.
You are just repeating industry propaganda.
Well, idk about power prices in the US, it's definitely cheaper to fill up than charge in my country. Of course I drive a diesel for the fuel efficiency. Petrol may be a different story.
And if people are blowing massive amounts of money on giant overpriced trucks - well, that's what they want then, and they get more of said giant overpriced truck for the same amount of money by not having 20-40k worth of batteries in it. It's still the consumers (who in this case are idiots) that want large overpriced V8 diesel trucks and telling them otherwise IS the car company trying to tell them what their preferences are.
It is far, far cheaper to charge at home here in the US.
A 2026 Nissan Leaf starts at under $30k in the US like most other comparable ICE cars. Batteries do not add 20-40k.
Everything you are saying is wrong in the context of the US. If your prices are that far apart where you live, that sucks.
I at one point looked up the price of a new Audi E-Tron battery and it was 37k. Dealer markup is part of it for sure, but the battery has to be pretty expensive to begin with. The E-Tron was more expensive than the bigger and better equipped Q7 too IIRC but I could be wrong.
Some richer people buy EVs without incentives. Most people can't with how expensive they are upfront. Same with solar panels.
EVs have been expensive in part because it costs money to switch production from ICE or build new production capacity, and to establish supply chains and take advantage of the economics of scale. That's a huge investment, but one that they have to make if they want to remain competitive in the long term.
The bigger issue has been that they aren't designing lower cost EVs. It's not exclusively an EV issue since they have been moving away from lower cost ICE vehicles for years too, it's just that EVs didn't have existing low cost product lines, and they're more interested in delaying EVs and using them as HALO products than in building a functional but low margin model. To say nothing of the many dealerships that have no interest in selling EVs and would rather steer people to a high margin gas guzzler.
As for solar, at the grid scale it's the cheapest power source available, with or without government funding, not to mention the fastest to deploy. And residential solar does make sense even without incentives. It will pay for itself, it's just the upfront cost that's the problem.The incentives make that easier, but even without them and with the need for financing, you still come out ahead as long as your monthly payment is in the same ballpark as your electric bill because the solar payments will stay the same over time until the loan is paid off, while your electricity rate will only ever go up.
Chinese EVs and solar panels are dirt cheap. They become expensive because of tariffs. And western car companies really don't like to invest in EVs because planning ahead 10 years won't pay off right NOW.
Western countries give subsidies to EV buyers, Chinese government gives subsidies to EV manufacturers, including for cars sold overseas. The idea is to drown out competition and then they can drop the subsidies and raise prices.
The tariffs are protection from an unfair strategy and is used in other markets, not just EVs - and against other countries, not just China. The idea is that if another country makes things artificially cheap, you use tariffs to level the playing field.
So yes, tariffs do have a valid use case. Whatever the fuck Trump decided to do with literally all of USA's trading partners is not one of them unless you REALLY want to isolate your own economy for the benefit of literally nobody but a few billionaires. But protecting your own internal industries from unfair competition absolutely is one.
They're cheap because they're massively subsidized by the Chinese government.
This is just xenophobic propaganda. When we subsidize EVs and solar, that's just us stimulating new industries. When they do it, it's those devil foreigners up to their evil deeds again!
No. When China subsidizes EVs, it's stimulating their new industry. And it's working. But the fact is still that their EVs are super cheap because they're massively subsidized.
You are asking a publicly traded company to just kill itself, which would ALSO be illegal, so here we are. They are literally required to make the decision that most economically benefits the company, and that is clearly not to build products for a market that does not exist and which may never exist.
I mean yeah, we are getting fucked, but at the moment in this particular case its Trump doing the fucking.
That is like saying Toyota was going to screw itself over by releasing the Prius.
No, that not true. Many shareholders will push for that, but many companies i vest heavily into development that stifles short term profits for long term gain and running a company into the ground with poor decisions is not illegal in any way whatsoever.
How would the law even know what decisions are the most profitable anyway? That bit of misinformation needs to die.
Seriously. Yes, the management of the company could be sued for intentionally tanking a company, but even that would need some egregious shit like emails saying "lol we're tanking the company on purpose" to get anywhere with it.
Long term profits, building brand awareness and goodwill are things companies can aim for instead of short term profits.
Remember that scene in the Dark Knight where the Joker holds a giant cash bonfire, burning all that mob cash? I'm pretty sure a CEO would have to do that before they could actually be sued by shareholders for not seeking maximum profit. There are just too many possible paths to profit otherwise, and they're allowed to focus on the long term rather than the short term.
That's not how the shareholder theory of value works. Companies have wide latitude in how they pursue profit, including being able to focus on the long term over the short term. As a shareholder, the only way you're winning a lawsuit against a publicly traded company for not seeking profit is if they do something insane to deliberately lose money. Like if the CEO gathers up a billion in cash and holds a literal money bonfire. That's what it would take for you to actually be able to sue a company for not seeking maximum profit.
Right, but it means they cannot ignore their own analysis just because it feels right.
I think they overestimated their market. I think the Lightning was the perfect truck to spearhead the EV transition. It looks, drives, and feels like a normal (yet powerful) truck. Being the highest volume seller, electrifying the F150 made sense on paper.
But that’s where it really stops.
The kind of person that buys a 4x4 F150, is not the same demographic that wants to be seen in an EV. As childish as the mentality sounds, that’s the demographic.
Where they sell 70,000 F-series (150 through 550 I think super duty’s included until dump beds), they only sold ~1,500-2,000 lightnings a month. Which honestly isn’t that bad for such a niche product.
I think the move to give it a plug in hybrid style powertrain will help sales as our travel charging infrastructure is still garbage. But try and tell people that they can just charge at home with an L2 and they freak out. It’s also frustrating that most people who are against EV’s just don’t understand technology in general.
In contrast, Ford sells about 15,000 mavericks a month. More when it was newer, same with the Lightning.
I do agree with your points and that Ford isn’t happy, and they could have handled the whole situation a little better.
Remember when marketing departments existed and it just drones pushing noise into the social media streams?
There was a time when company's would sell people on ideas to create the demand.
Why is it that electric cars have to be weird, ridiculously high performance, or both?
I don't want strange controls, I don't want virtual door handles, I don't want a cab full of computer screens, I don't want bizarre styling, and I honestly don't want a 250mph 0-60 in 0.2 seconds hypercar. Give me a car that looks and acts normally but has an electric powertrain so that I can plug it in at home rather than having to go to a gas station all the time.
They should have a fully electric Maverick.
I also think that PHEVs are great for all the rurals. Especially if they keep the ICE fairly powerful. Just tell people "for your grocery run to town you don't need any fuel, but to get to the next town over you can just hoon the ecoboost. Or fuck it, build a V8 diesel PHEV. Nothing stopping them from doing it, it's not like F series buyers care about excess weight lmao
I think it's less about aversion to EVs and more about aversion to the $100,000 price tag.
If that thing is $50k, I think sales at least stay even, if not pick up.
To me it's more about commitment that charging infrastructure will be there tomorrow. I know it's fine in some cities and suburban areas already, but anywhere Ruralish charging availability is a crapshoot so you range anxiety is a real problem. If you know the government is forcing EVs to be the future, some of that anxiety goes away as you know they will have to build more charge infrastructure.
Definitely part of it IMO