Small EVs are a big market abroad—a stark contrast to the gigantic offerings like the Ford F-150 Lightning and the plethora of electric SUVs that are prevalent in the U.S. But the small EV market here is growing, and Ford is getting in on the action. The automaker is pivoting to smaller—and cheaper—electric vehicles.
Ford CEO Jim Farley first revealed the pivot on an earnings call in early February. “We made a bet in silence two years ago,” he said, according to MotorTrend, revealing that a skunk works team acting as a startup began working on a low-cost EV back then, in order to better compete with electric vehicles from Chinese automakers.
Now, there are more details on just how affordable those new Ford EVs will be: Bloomberg Businessweek reported this week that the first model will arrive in late 2026, starting around $25,000. (The F-150 Lightning starts at $54,995, while Ford’s electric SUV, the Mustang Mach-E, starts around $43,000.)
Ford is working on its small EVs through a “specialized team” that is based in Irvine, California, Bloomberg reports. That team—made up of fewer than 100 people—is led by Alan Clarke, who was previously at Tesla for 12 years. There, he led the engineering of the Model Y, the company’s top seller; Clarke moved to Ford in 2022.
The compact EVs for Ford will be powered by a “lithium iron phosphate battery, which is about 30% cheaper than traditional lithium-ion batteries,” according to Bloomberg, noting that the company is continuing to explore even cheaper battery tech.
“All of our EV teams are ruthlessly focused on cost and efficiency in our EV products, because the ultimate competition is going to be the affordable Tesla and the Chinese OEMs [original equipment manufacturers],” Farley said on the February analyst call. Tesla is also working on a cheaper EV, which is also expected to go for $25,000. Tesla CEO Elon Musk first mentioned that goal in 2020; now, he’s said that the cheaper model will launch in 2025.
I’ve been driving a gen 1 leaf for several years. If you want to slow/ stop adoption, low range vehicles and the experience that comes with them is precisely how to do so. Its a real problem. I get and hear your arguments, but they fall flat when pushed against the lived experience. In fact, even your suggestions here make me think you don’t own an EV or have to any experience with driving one, so I’ll share my experience.
First off, you can not count on getting a charge away from the home. Between broken chargers, removed chargers, the system not working, the chargers being occupied, or there just not being one any where close to where you need to go, you simply can not rely on getting a charge away from where you park and know you can absolutely get one (even if its a trickle charge). You can argue that we need a more robust charging network, but that’s a separate issue from their unreliability or even existence. The on the ground situation is that you have to treat charging outside of where you know you can get it as a nice to have, not a need to have, or you will find yourself stuck. I’ve been there too many times waiting in line at the charging station for two hours so I can then charge for 30 minutes to an hour to get all the way home. That’s three hours of my day gone because my car doesn’t have enough range. I simply can-not afford that. If that happens to me once in a month, another 50 dollars on my car payment for a car with a larger battery is a non-issue.
Second, some times you need to make more than two trips in a day, which is about all 100 miles in range is good for. These times are less common but you should keep a driving journal. I bet you do 150+ miles in a day at least once a month. The US is an extremely spread out place. If I wanted to go to Home Depot or similar big box, the average drive time for me over the last 3 places I’ve lived is 35 minutes, one way. We all know its impossible to get everything you need in one trip to the homeless despot, so if I need to double back because I forgot a widget, I’m now properly fucked and need to charge. Saturday is now gone and my home repair project is pushed into Sunday. Thanks e-waste equivalent EV. Added to this is the issue of weight and drag. I get probably 30% better range when I’m driving alone. If I start adding weight, my power consumption increases dramatically. 100 miles of range will quickly turn turn into 50 miles of range if I’ve got bags of soil, or lumber, or strawbales, or any number of other things I regularly need to pick up from a home goods or farm store. Four fat friends want to hop in the whip and go for a drive? Good luck.
Third, rain or other inclimate weather. When you start paying attention to EV performance, its straight up shocking what a headwind or even a light rain on the road can do to your range. I really never considered how sticky water is until I needed to become battery conscious. Where this becomes a real issue is if you’ve planned your trip to be all good in hollywood based on decent weather, and for the first half of you trip you are fine. But then weather comes in and you don’t have the range to finish your trip because a storm moved through. I’ve also heard cold weather impacts capacity, although i can’t speak to that directly.
And heres the crux of it. One bad experience is all it takes to turn someone off for life. Lower capacity batteries lead directly to these bad experiences, and having now owned and lived on an EV for years, I would never in my wildest dreams consider buying one with less than 200 miles of range, with 240 being a pretty firm lower bound for me that I might negotiate on in exceptional cases. A vehicle with that little range is more environmentally damaging than a heavier, more expensive EV because its basically E-waste as soon as you’ve rolled off the lot. An EV with 240 range is a vehicle you’ll own, love, and enjoy for life. An EV with less than 100 miles in range? You’ve turned some one off from EV’s forever.
I want to point out also that embedded in your sentiment is a judgement of how things “should be”, in that you say Amercians “have been fooled”. Which is fine. Maybe things should be that way. But appreciate that things are where they are, and the context of only having to drive to the grocery store and back or only to work is simply not true. People do use their cars, alot. American infrastructure is built around it. Maybe things should be another way, but they are the way they are, and 100 miles of range is simply going to reduce/ prevent EV adoption.
Not your commenter, but I appreciate your laid-out feedback on the <100mi EV. The first gen Leaf is exactly what I’m shopping for due to the continued (although reduced) price gouging of used EVs/hybrids since 2020. If I was in your situation where Home Depot was 35 minutes away, I’m not sure I’d even go for a hybrid. Sounds like mostly 50mph+ roads so a great gas car might work better, unless you’re in a hilly/mountainous area that would hurt the climb of a low power gas car too. However, I live somewhere with at least 10 HDs within 35 minutes. Based on some rough math, 20% of the US population is within that 240 mile range from me. I would guess 75% of them have less than a 20 minute drive, mostly fuels by slower roads and traffic. That’s just one of the main pop hubs in the country, so I beleive 35+ minutes each way for errands may not be true for half the population.
That’s not to say you’re wrong, of course, not at all. I applaud your dedication to the platform I have not yet myself gotten on board with. I’d like to, but price has been a barrier until recently with a crossover between market, salary, and need. That’s been my choice by being cheap and choosing to have multiple enthusiast vehicles (including my 23mpg-city 4x4 commuter smaller than a miata) worth $3k each. But now that I can work remote when it snows, I don’t have parking constraints now, and I never actually went wheeling in the 4x4, I’m really considering trading it out for a lower EV.
So what’s my point? I think your conversation above is really highlighting a divide - likely intentional from above but unintentional from you - about whether EV can work or not. You’re living the life where it’s not very compatible as a sole vehicle, but making it work anyway. Most people in your situation seem to beleive EV will simply never work. There’s a misinformation act to take the “all cars must be EV by 2035” to mean gas is gone, when in reality it means all models must have an EV version available. I beleive we’re stuck in a his&hers situation with vehicles too. I drive a shitbox I don’t like on the highway for more than 20 minutes and my highway cruise missile car is often broken. So we take my wife’s car often for trips. My commuter could be easily swapped for a ratty 80 mile Leaf and never have range issues. That’s my situation but I beleive it applies more broadly. I did the math once and figured the average car-owning household (so removing carless people) has 1.3 cars per adult. So most households have a car per person and many have spare cars in some way. And that’s no even getting into the American dream vacation of 800 miles per day being absurd and incredibly rare. This fuels a greater divide where rural folks get mad at city folks for pushing EV or, worse, enjoy and thrive with an EV. This country is so drastically diverse in density and geography. It fuels this idea that states, the land masses, are sentient and therefore big states are more representative of the country. But that’s not a country, people are. And, as exemplified by overbearing Border Patrol allowances, 2/3 of the US population is within their jurisdiction because 2/3 of the population lives within 100 miles of a border. That means the entire interior, I estimate 3/4 of the land, has 1/3 of the population. In no way am I saying that 1/3 should be forgotten or bullied. But I beleive that overepresentation of that actual need for greater range spills too far into the cushy suburbs where an EV would only benefit from the traffic compared to gas. That then morphs into a fear of the government taking everything away. Probably by design.
I still don’t really know where I was going anymore. You’ve provided a great recount of how rough a <100mi EV can be debilitating. I’m still convinced an old Leaf is perfect. I still hope they’ll make those <100mi range EVs but with appreciably lower cost.
Great response and thank you for that
I think most broadly, taking away from comments, it’s that selection and competition in the market pace are good for as consumers. Both of these use cases are completely valid and totally reasonable and finding decently priced products to meet both of those use cases should be possible.
Just another point of anectdata, we keep a 4 door truck that we drive maybe 4 x a month and when guest come out for doing tourist stuff. Without it there is no way we could make it work.
This is the vehicle we’re talking about getting as a replacement to our leaf: https://www.canoo.com/canoo/
I don’t think I’ve seen that one before. I love it. It looks like the same spartan golf cart shape as the Mitsubishi i, but properly sized for a family vehicle rather than a campus cart. I shopped briefly for an i but it has a used price comparable to the original Leaf with less range and lower top speed. Given my disdain for Tesla (even before Elon showed his true Elon, I didn’t like the bad qc and seemingly rushed scifi features), I’m really looking forward to a more diverse EV market. One where I can shop 10 completely distinct vehicles that all suit my variety of needs the way I shop across a swath of gas vehicles now.