Ford to Stop Producing F-150 Lightnings Until Next Year

It’s been a bit of a rough week for Ford Motor Company. On Monday, when the automaker announced third-quarter earnings, it revealed that warranty costs are still tugging at its net income, which fell 26 percent. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the company is tying manager bonuses more closely to product quality and costs, as sources told Reuters earlier today. More discouraging, at least for the firm’s EV business, which lost $1.2B during Q3, was the news (confirmed to Automotive News) that Ford won’t build any new electric trucks until next year.

The 12-acre Rouge Electric Vehicle Center in Dearborn, Michigan, will shut down beginning at the end of the day on Friday, November 15. Approximately 800 employees, including 750 hourly workers, will head home. (Headcount data comes from Ford as of April 2024.) The assembly line will be quiet for seven weeks. On Monday, January 6, 2025, production is scheduled to resume. The F-150 Lightning, which went into full production right on schedule, on April 26, 2022, is the first electric vehicle made at Rouge, whose EV-specific manufacturing center opened in 2021, the fruits of a $700M investment.

Those three years have been a rollercoaster for the F-150 Lightning. It may be the most well-executed electric pickup on the market, but it is no longer the best-selling one. (As of July, that’s the Tesla Cybertruck.) Ford—along with every other company that makes electric vehicles—has been surprised by the flow, then ebb, of interest in electric vehicles. In January of 2022, after being forced to cap reservations at 200,000, Ford doubled production, anticipating 150,000 units per year. Fast forward to the beginning of 2024, and Ford lowered production targets by half and cut jobs at Rouge, trimming back to just one shift. Ford had sold 24,000 units in 2023. As of October 3, 2024 sales totals weren’t far off that: 22,807.

Ford hasn’t idled Rouge since August of 2023, when it shut down the factory to retool. That took six weeks, essentially the same duration as the scheduled shutdown this fall, since the upcoming seven-week idle period will include the standard holiday week break. Ford’s been making some tough decisions this year, such as canceling a three-row EV, delaying a mid-size EV pickup, which is being developed by a “skunkworks” team in California, and focusing instead on an EV work van. The successor to the F-150 Lightning isn’t due until 2027. In the meantime, expect the automaker to lean on its cash cow—the commercial vehicle business, Ford Pro, which builds the Super Duty trucks—to keep things afloat.