The great electric vehicle fantasy crashes into reality as Ford abandons flagship EVs, swallows $19.5 billion loss
By isabelle // 2025-12-16
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  • Ford announces a massive $19.5 billion writedown as it retreats from electric vehicles.
  • The company is discontinuing models like the F-150 Lightning due to catastrophic losses.
  • Consumer rejection is driven by high costs, limited range, and impracticality.
  • This follows an industry-wide pattern of scaling back EV production and plans.
  • The shift marks a return to gasoline and hybrid vehicles that consumers demand.
The electric vehicle revolution, long championed by climate alarmists and government central planners, has hit a wall of financial and consumer reality. In a stunning admission of failure, Ford Motor Company announced this week it is taking a monumental $19.5 billion writedown as it discontinues several electric models, including its flagship F-150 Lightning pickup. This strategic retreat from all-electric vehicles marks one of the largest corporate impairments in history and signals a decisive pivot back to the gasoline and hybrid vehicles that American consumers actually want. The move, driven by catastrophic losses and evaporating demand, exposes the green energy transition as an unaffordable fantasy forced upon the public. For years, political and environmental elites have demanded an immediate, forced transition to electric vehicles, dismissing practical concerns and economic realities. Ford’s $19.5 billion reckoning, concentrated in its electric vehicle business, is the direct result of that failed agenda. The company is essentially incinerating capital spent chasing a market that never materialized as promised. This writedown includes $8.5 billion from halted EV projects and $6 billion from exiting a battery partnership, a clear signal that the infrastructure for this mandated transition is collapsing under its own weight.

A market speaks... finally

The core issue is simple: people do not want these vehicles in the numbers required to make them viable. Ford CEO Jim Farley stated the obvious, telling Reuters that a market shift over recent months forced the company’s hand. “When the market really changed over the last couple of months, that was really the impetus for us to make the call,” Farley said. This “change” is not a temporary blip but a fundamental rejection of EVs due to high costs, limited range, long charging times, and expensive repairs. Ford expects to lose another $5 billion on EVs this year, matching last year’s staggering losses. The poster child for this failure is the F-150 Lightning. Launched with great fanfare and political promotion, it was touted as the truck of the future. In reality, it became a symbol of unmet promises. Sales have plummeted, collapsing 72 percent in November compared to the previous year. The truck’s inability to tow significant loads without drastically reducing range, coupled with its extreme weight posing dangers to parking structures, made it impractical for the very customers it was meant to attract. Ford will now replace it with an extended-range version that uses a gasoline engine, a tacit admission that pure battery power is insufficient.

The end of a coerced transition

This is not an isolated incident. Ford’s retreat follows a pattern across the industry. General Motors recently took a $1.6 billion charge to scale back its EV production. Hertz sold off a third of its EV fleet due to lack of interest and high costs. These actions collectively represent a market correction after years of distortion by heavy government subsidies and aggressive emissions regulations. The recent removal of the $7,500 federal EV tax credit accelerated the demand collapse, proving that the market was artificially propped up by taxpayer dollars. The historical context here is crucial. The Biden administration aggressively pushed automakers toward an all-electric future, using regulations and incentives to override consumer choice. That top-down engineering of the economy has now collided with the free market. With regulatory pressure easing, automakers are finally free to respond to what customers truly desire: practical, affordable, and reliable vehicles. Hybrids, which offer improved efficiency without the drastic compromises of pure EVs, are emerging as the sensible compromise that Americans are choosing. Ford anticipates that hybrids, extended-range vehicles, and full EVs will comprise half its global sales by 2030, a significant shift from pure electric toward more practical alternatives. The company will redirect capital from money-losing EV projects into these higher-return areas. As Andrew Frick, head of Ford’s gas and EV operations, put it, “Rather than spending billions more on large EVs that now have no path to profitability, we are allocating that money into higher-returning areas.” This is the language of sanity returning to boardrooms after a long hiatus. The green promises surrounding EVs are also failing to materialize. The environmental cost of mining for battery materials, the strain on the electrical grid, and the challenge of recycling batteries present a full lifecycle that is far from “clean.” The narrative of EVs as an unalloyed good for the planet is crumbling under scrutiny, even as their economic model collapses.

A return to common sense

The great EV experiment serves as a potent lesson in the limits of political force against economic and engineering reality. Automakers spent hundreds of billions based on regulatory mandates rather than organic demand, and they are now writing off those losses. The consumer, not the bureaucrat, ultimately decides what succeeds in the marketplace. The shift back to hybrids and improved gasoline engines represents a victory for practical innovation over ideological dogma. Sources for this article include: TheEpochTimes.com WSJ.com FT.com BBC.com
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