Ford announced a new electric pickup truck that it will roll out in 2027 with a starting price of $30,000. The new truck will rival the cost of Chinese EVs, which are typically much less expensive than their Western counterparts.
The new EV from Ford will be assembled at its 70-year-old plant in Louisville, Kentucky, which will be retooled at a cost of $2 billion. The $30,000 price point is nearly half the price of the lowest-cost EV pickup now on the market in the U.S.
The 2025 Ford F-150 Lightning has a base price of nearly $55,000.
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Ford recently set up a skunkworks team in Southern California, dedicated to working on Ford’s EV line.
“It’s essentially a small, dedicated pirate group of people who get set up in a different place than where your headquarters is, with a single mission,” John Voelcker, contributing editor at Car and Driver Magazine, told Straight Arrow News. “Think about the first Apple Macintosh, for instance, to be invented. Same concept, and they went away. And their mission was to make a system, a platform, a production process, sourcing all the rest of it, so that we can, in fact, produce a viable, market-acceptable $30,000 electric car to compete with what’s going to be coming down the pike.”
Chinese EVs in America
What’s coming down the pike could be Chinese EVs. Few are available in America, although they are being sold across Asia, Australia, South America and more.
“Chairman Mao had a saying: Take the country, surround the cities, or take the countryside, surround the cities,” Voelcker said. “North America is really the last city, and it’s a big market. It’s a complicated market. It’s a market with fairly low prices in some ways, and it obviously has political ramifications above and beyond just selling cars here. So, I think Chinese makers are being cautious.”
While Chinese manufacturers may have their eyes on the American market, several other factors are standing in their way. First of all, it won’t come cheap.
“It’s been estimated that to get a car brand established in the minds of the large, sprawling and very diverse American driving public, which is 98% of Americans, costs about a billion dollars,” Voelcker said.
Then, of course, there’s the political climate and the ongoing trade war between the U.S. and China.
“If they were imported here, it’d be 100% tariffed, as well as on top of that, the 45% that is currently underway,” Erin Keating, executive analyst at Cox Automotive, told Straight Arrow News. “So I don’t think in the next three to five years, unless there is some deal that Trump does where it allows more Chinese manufacturers to actually come to the U.S. and import here and/or build here and sell here.”
If the Chinese were to compete with U.S. domestic automakers, the government could take steps to protect companies like Ford and General Motors.
“Since the Chinese are so far ahead in electric cars, we let their factories into the U.S. under the same terms they let the rest of the world into China,” Voelcker said. “You have to have a 50-50 joint venture with a native producer, so the native producer can learn from you.”
Competition with China
While U.S. automakers may not be competing with China stateside, it hasn’t slowed the global competition.
“A lot of people are talking about regionalization now, and do you start building just for the market in which you’re in?” Keating said. “I just don’t see the feasibility of that for some of our largest automakers. I think there’s still a desire to export and to move into other markets, and so for them to be competitive across the globe, they are going to have to be able to find at least a couple of segments where they’d be able to fight appropriately for the electric vehicle competition.”
That competition is something China has been preparing for longer than the U.S.
“China set out in 2014 with a plan called Made in China 2025 translated,” Voelcker said. “That says, here is what the government is going to support over the next 10 years, so that in 2025, China will be dominant in these dozen or so advanced technology areas. One of them was batteries. One of them was electric vehicles, and they have largely accomplished that.”
Overall, prices for EVs in America have dropped, but the average price still sits around the $55,000 mark. That’s compared to an average price of about $23,000 for Chinese EVs.
“Their cost, their quality of their vehicles is far superior to what I see in the West,” Ford CEO Jim Farley said in a recent interview with the Car Dealership Guy website. “We are in a global competition with China, and it’s not just EVs.”
Tesla is the largest EV seller in the U.S., and even they’ve lost some global market share to Chinese manufacturers like BYD.
As the global competition for EVs heats up and moves closer to America, it’s something industry leaders will need to keep at the top of their watch list.
“Their executives are not dumb,” Voelcker said. “They see what’s happening in the rest of the world. They understand that not only is the rest of the world moving to electric vehicles, China at the forefront, Europe and the UK behind it, some less affluent countries, less so, but that the U.S. is falling increasingly behind in this technology.”
