The Sad Truth About the Cost of Electric Cars: Head of Ford Admits Price Parity Unlikely Before 2030

Ford has bet basically everything on electric cars and defends its decision as much as it can. One has to be surprised by this even without anything else, but it is even more surprising when such things fall from the mouth of the head of a car company.

Axiom at the beginning: Electric cars are an unsolicited solution for the vast majority of customers, which is forced on people under the guise of some kind of higher good, despite the fact that it is worse and at the same time more expensive. This sentence really cannot be discussed too much, because the offer of these cars came from the political will, which many car companies accepted as theirs due to the easier planning of their own future and the creation of greater barriers to entry into the industry. And there is currently no way to offer a functionally comparable electric car at the price of an internal combustion car.

The problem is essentially both in themselves, i.e. both the limited practical usability and the high price. If at least one of these limits fell, the potential impact of electric cars would increase significantly, but neither of them will. Technically, electric cars are limited by the possibilities of batteries, for which there is no chance of anything significantly better coming any time soon. And for the price, actually. At least there was some hope there, but if even the head of Ford does not believe in such a thing, it is obvious that it is minimal to zero.

Ford has bet practically everything on electric cars, so it should be very optimistic about them. But it’s one thing to tell stories to the press, it’s another to tell them to the company’s investors – the first can be somewhat “snorted”, but the second can easily be criminal. And even Ford CEO Jim Farley prefers not to tell fairy tales.

Reuters reports that Farley said at a meeting with investors that he doesn’t see a chance of getting electric cars down to the level of internal combustion cars before 2030. Considering what politicians and automakers have been telling us for years, the price parity of these types cars within reach, it is a very distant date. Moreover, we are still only talking about price parity, not comparable usability. And to top it all off, it must be added that Farley builds even such expectations on rather tricky foundations.

According to him, the change should come at the moment when the production of the second and third generation of modern electric cars begins. This is expected to happen between 2030 and 2035, when automakers will significantly reduce the cost of electric cars thanks to “dramatically lower labor requirements” because it will be easier to produce electric cars due to their reduced number of parts. In addition, he says they will be equipped with smaller batteries using cheaper materials.

This makes sense in general, but not so much specifically. Electric cars are already less demanding to manufacture today, except for the batteries. Above all, they are expensive and bad, the former due to the lack of precious metals needed for their production. We are not saying that nothing will change in this field by 2030, but betting on it is more of a blind faith than a qualified assumption.

In addition, it should be added that the development of internal combustion cars can continue and if today they were not burdened with various forms of emission allowances and other meaningless instruments (and electric cars were not subsidized with the same money), they would be available for easily a third of the price. It will be very difficult to reduce such a difference to nothing, quite possibly even more difficult than Jim Farley thinks.

Today, the electric Ford Mustang Mach-E is a completely uncompetitive car in terms of usability and price. The head of Ford is betting everything on such, even though he himself says that they will be expensive at least until 2030. And what is to come after that is more of a fortune telling from a crystal ball. Under such circumstances, does the blue oval procedure seem reasonable to you? On me. Photo: Ford

Source: Reuters

Petr Miler

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