Indeed,
“Ford just reported a massive loss on every electric vehicle it sold”
https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/24/business/ford-earnings-ev-losses/index.html
That’s R&D cost divided over a small number of vehicles, not the cost of material and labor that goes into each vehicle. It only looks bad on paper.
For example, if you invest $100 in R&D and it costs $1 to produce each car, then the first car out of the factory costs $101. Sell that first car for $10 and you’ve “lost” $91. But if you can sell 100 cars, then each car only costs $2, not $101, and now on paper it looks like you’ve made $8 on each sale.
Time will tell if Ford made the right decisions about what kind of car to engineer and if consumers will continue to buy it long enough to make back the one time R&D expenses. That would happen faster if their margins on labor and material is high, like it is on trucks and SUVs, which makes those a safer investment.
@Delta_V going back many years I’ve heard the description of the automobile industry problem as “overcapacity.”
Too many companies in too many countries are fighting for too few buyers, compared to that production capacity. Like, if you ran all plants atlnd all shifts it would be way too many cars.
Now that’s happening in EVs right?
To make money, on specifically the Mustang, Ford it has to sell a lot of Mustangs. Unfortunately everyone else is trying the same thing at the same time.