Ford pulls the plug on the F-150 Lightning electric pickup truck

Ford Motor Company has ceased production of the F-150 Lightning, its flagship full-size electric pickup, and will focus instead on hybrid vehicles and a future line of smaller, cheaper EVs. Battery plants once intended to supply Ford trucks will now be sending batteries to bolster the electric grid instead.

Ford says the move is following customer demand, and reflecting the reality that the Lightning was a money-loser — and Ford, concluded, it always would be.

“The American consumer is speaking clearly and they want the benefits of electrification like instant torque and mobile power,” said Andrew Frick, the president of Ford Blue and Ford model e, the company’s commercial and electric divisions. He spoke to reporters on a call on Monday. “But they also demand affordability … rather than spending billions more on large EVs that now have no path to profitability, we are allocating that money into higher-returning areas.”

The Lightning’s design evolved from what was once a gas-powered truck. And now it will come full circle; an upcoming plug-in hybrid version of the truck will once again have a gasoline engine, in the form of a generator that will allow the vehicle to keep driving even if the battery runs out of juice. The all-electric Lightning is dead; the extended-range Lightning is on its way.

The F-150 Lightning was a big deal to Ford. It was announced in 2021 with great fanfare and an appealingly low price of just $40,000. But once it actually hit production lines, Ford was never able to sell it for anything close to the promised price tag; the 2025 model started at around $55,000.

The truck was designed to appeal to mainstream truck enthusiasts, with no quirky EV styling. It came festooned with outlets everywhere, leveraging the onboard battery so drivers could run tools at a worksite, power appliances at a tailgate party and even run their house on it, using it like a generator during a power outage.

The Lightning won 2023 Truck of the Year from Motortrend, unanimously, and from the North American Car, Utility and Truck of the Year Awards. It was Kelley Blue Book’s top pick for electric trucks in 2024. And it was the best-selling electric truck in America last quarter, Ford says.

But that category as a whole was struggling, as electric pickups failed to live up to lofty expectations — for performance and affordability, and as a result, for sales. The Lightning, in particular, struggled with reliability. Shoppers were turned off by its limited range when towing; why buy a truck that can’t do truck stuff? 

And, more to the point, Ford lost money on every vehicle, even at the higher-than-promised price point. EV sales have been lower than automakers had expected in the past few years. Production costs didn’t come down as much as Ford had hoped.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has pulled a 180 on EV policy, eliminating incentives and requirements that pushed buyers and automakers alike toward electric vehicles.

That includes stripping away a $7,500 tax credit that had made some EVs more affordable, and removing emissions and fuel economy standards that gave Ford — among other EV makers — an incentive to keep unprofitable vehicles in production. Those rules, which required automakers to make their new vehicle fleets cleaner, on average, over time, are being dialed down — which means automakers can make more big gas- and diesel-powered trucks and fewer EVs without running afoul of federal regulations.

Frick said that “changes in the regulatory environment” were part of the “entire landscape” that pushed Ford to discontinue the vehicle and work on the extended-range version instead.

Meanwhile, Ford’s all-electric ambitions will be smaller — literally, with more compact and affordable vehicles at the heart of the company’s EV plans, starting with the midsize pickup truck the company announced in August. Ford is targeting a price point of $30,000 and expects to roll them out roughly a year from now.

The change in plans will cost Ford billions of dollars in write-offs and cash this year, but the company says it will make up for it by replacing a money-losing vehicle with ones it hopes will be profitable.

The pivot also leaves Ford with far more battery production capacity than it needs, since the company had invested heavily to build battery factories to supply the EV production lines that it’s now idling.

So it announced a new line of business: Ford will be revamping a battery production site in Kentucky to build batteries for stationary storage instead of for trucks. Those batteries can be sold to balance the electric grid — batteries can charge up when electricity is cheap, like when wind and solar are abundant, and discharge it when electricity is scarce, a phenomenon that’s already reshaping the electric grids in California and Texas.

They’ll also be sold to data centers and other industrial customers, Ford says.