Ford cuts EV plans even as it becomes nation’s second-largest EV brand

Enlarge / Electric F-150 sales are up 80 percent year over year. (credit: Ford)

Ford has caught a case of electric vehicle pessimism and is scaling back or delaying some of its plans for new EV models. A new electric pickup, scheduled to go into production next year, has been pushed back to 2026. And a three-row electric SUV has been given a two-year delay and will now not be available until 2027 at the earliest. The kicker? The automaker has published its sales for the first quarter of the year, and its EV sales are up a whopping 86 percent year over year.

Instead, the Blue Oval wants to focus on making more hybrids instead, and says it will have hybrid options for all its internal combustion engine-powered vehicles by 2030. Ford's current range of hybrids is not extensive, but it grew 42 percent in Q1 compared to the first three months of 2023.

Many of those—19,660 to be exact—were the Maverick Hybrid, despite the fact that for model year 2024, Ford removed the hybrid powertrain as the base model and effectively gave the electrified pickup a $1,500 price hike. In total, Ford sold 38,421 hybrids in Q1 2024, which it says makes this the best-ever quarter for hybrid sales. But they represent a rather small slice of its overall pie—just 7.6 percent of the 508,083 vehicles that Ford sold for the first three months of the year.