How could you ever fuck your production cost so much as to get losses like that.

It's because there is a lot of fixed cost being divided into a relatively small number of units. For instance "Ford Blue" is Ford's ICE division and in Q1 it moved about 626,000 units while "Ford Model e" is Ford's EV division and it only moved about 10,000 units in Q1. Source.

So if Ford Blue spends a Billion dollars that's a per vehicle cost of $1,597. If Ford Model e spends a Billion dollars its a per vehicle cost of $100,000.

So what would cost a Billion dollar? Well, how about 3 new battery factories plus an EV assembly factory that cost something like 7 Billion dollars?

That's not nearly all of it either. In May of 2021 Ford said that would spend something like 30 Billion by 2025 (that's next year!) to increase EV production.

So yeah, Ford has spent the GDP of some small countries shifting to EV production and when you divide those very large sums into a very small number of vehicles you get upside down real quick.

Ford has been mismanaged and only kept alive through BS, anticonsumer protectionist policies for decades at this point. It's my opinion that they genuinely don't even know how to run a successful business because "going under" hasn't been a real concern for them for longer than most of the executives have been at the company.

Somewhat Ironically, the tariff increase against Chinese cars is mostly for political show. There are virtually no Chinese cars being sold in the US, and those that are sold are not chinese brands but American brands (e.g. Buick, Lincoln) manufactured in China. The reason there are no Chinese brands on the market is that the existing 25% tariff is already enough to make it very unattractive.

However Biden is hoping to win the support of United Auto Workers and the like, who are all afraid of losing their jobs to Chinese workers getting paid a tenth of what they make or w/e. Trump has been using the same talking points, suggesting tariffs on Chinese cars built in Mexico (I don't think that's a real thing at this point, just something that could happen). It's all political theater.

This was the whole point of restructuring. Gaming our tax and legal system to maximize profits. Put all the losses into your LLC.

It's basically the entire year cost divided by cars sold or something like that yes.

It's a terrible way to do it.

For example, pre pandemic, Ford was actually just gross margin positive on the sale of the Mach E, which was quite impressive, but it was overall a loss due to all the R&D.

This is the same attack people used against Tesla early on as well. Since the Model S, Tesla was nearly always gross margin positive on their vehicles, but because of the massive R&D were still in the red.

At any moment, Tesla could have dramatically slowed growth and been profitable sooner, but you don't grow and expand that way, so it was years of Tesla loses $X per car.

It was terrible then, it's terrible now, it'll always be terrible.

Buying and running the tools it takes to make the EV, running the factories and training the workers are all very expensive. So the losses implies they projected a LOT higher volume than they're currently producing so all the expensive equipment sitting idle is spread over the smaller volume of cars. These are called NRE (non-recoverable expenses).

Is Ford the leader in the EV market?

PHEVs are kind of pointless because most consumers buying them tend to not actually flip to the electric mode during low-use periods, making the hybridized nature of the vehicle functionally useless.

I wish ford would do that but I don't think they will. They're only bringing the phev ranger to Europe, and iirc started they had no plans to make the maverick a plug in. And the f150 already has the electric version in the lightning.