Ford is converting an electric vehicle factory to produce gasoline-powered pickups

Ford had plans to build a lot of electric SUVs at a plant in Canada.

Instead, it decided to make pickup trucks that people want to buy.

As a result, the automaker is putting off plans for electric versions of its Ford Explorer and Lincoln Aviator and will churn out Super Duty pickup trucks at its Oakville, Ontario, plant, The New York Times reported Thursday.

Ford is not alone. General Motors said it will make about 200,000 to 250,000 battery-powered vehicles this year, 50,000 below earlier estimates.

“After the pandemic, there was a huge exuberance around EVs, and I think a lot of the manufacturers thought that growth was going to continue,” Arun Kumar, a partner and managing director at the consulting firm AlixPartners, told the Times.

“But the reality is that’s not the case, and it’s a smart move to make sure you’re not losing market in internal combustion,” he said.

GM and Ford had been touting the fact that they would have the capacity to make a million EVs a year by the middle of this decade.

However, slower-than-expected sales mean that capacity will not come about as planned, GM CEO Mary Barra said last week.

The Times said Tesla has scrapped expectations of sales growing 50 percent a year as global sales are down 6.6 percent.

Ford CEO Jim Farley said despite two plants making the Super Duty trucks, “We can’t meet the demand.”

And so the company will invest $3 billion to make the gas-powered vehicles in Ontario, with the first trucks rolling off the line in 2026.

Ford lost nearly $4.7 billion on its EV operations in 2023 and projects losing $5.5 billion this year, leading to a February company statement that the next generation of EVs will arrive  “only when they can be profitable,” according to Reuters.

Even in California, EVs are not taking over the highways.

Electric vehicles have about 21.9 percent of the market as of the first six months of this year, down a notch after hitting 22 percent last year, the Los Angeles Times reported on Thursday.

When does a sales-growth downturn move from a temporary blip to a longer-term trend?

Maybe right now.

After years of rapid growth, electric vehicles sales in California went flat in the middle of last year and the trend continues.https://t.co/sSqjrdkrIE

— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) July 18, 2024

The state’s climate plan is based on EVs amounting to 35 percent of the market, which will require a 20 percent annual growth rate.

However, through the second quarter of this year, EV registration dropped 1.2 percent, according to the Times.