Ford had a big, long, detailed-but-not-really-detailed presentation for investors Wednesday morning, and so far it is having its intended effect. Ford’s stock is up seven percent today off what Ford has declared. Its electric vehicles are actually “digital cars,” with an all-electric Explorer and all-electric Aviator coming, and probably an all-electric Bronco, too. Ford — you may have heard this before — is a tech company now.
Ford said it would be investing over $30 billion in electrification by 2025, or at least $8 billion more than what it had previously said, and more than GM has said that it will invest. Ford thinks 40 percent of its sales globally will be EV by 2030. Ford thinks that it will eventually make more money from EVs than from internal combustion engine cars, because it thinks that its EV development costs will eventually go down. And because it thinks the market for “driver-assist technologies, new features and upgraded software content, and EV charging” will be worth $20 billion by 2030.
Ford is also happy to talk some shit about Tesla in its accompanying press release, as its plans include:
Having about 1 million vehicles that are capable of receiving over-the-air system updates on the road by the end of this year, exceeding Tesla’s volume by July 2022, and scaling to 33 million OTA-enabled Ford and Lincoln vehicles by 2028.
Ford said that it has 70,000 reservations for the F-150 Lightning so far, and that an all-electric Explorer and an all-electric Aviator are planned by 2030. And, probably, an all-electric Bronco:
Ford also thinks that its commercial offerings will be taking in $45 billion by 2025, or almost double the $27 billion it took in in 2019, thanks to a new business called Ford Pro. Oh, and batteries, Ford has big plans for its batteries.
Vertically integrating battery technology with an extensive range of EV batteries – IonBoost lithium ion; IonBoost Pro lithium iron phosphate for commercial vehicles; and long-range, low-cost solid-state batteries based on Ford’s own engineering and know-how from Solid Power, in which the company holds an equity stake, and
Forming a joint venture, BlueOvalSK, with SK Innovation to manufacture battery cells and arrays at two plants in the U.S. for future Ford and Lincoln vehicles.
Ford is continuing to pitch itself as the anti-Tesla, in other words, an EV company that actually knows what it’s doing and knows how to make money doing it.
Ford CEO Jim Farley had called today his “coming out party,” since he’s only been in the job since October. In the end, the coming out party was long and fairly boring, it must be said. But that, too, is anti-Tesla.