Big 3 salaried labor cuts of 19% return levels to pre-pandemic era

 Detroit automakers have cut more than 20,000 U.S. salaried jobs as AI threat looms

 

 

The U.S. state capitalist EV boondoggle comes to an end, shape-shifting automakers take well-deserved $50 billion hit

 

 Detroit Automakers Take $50 Billion Hit as EV Bubble Bursts

... Following years of investments into EV technology, the Detroit Big Three ... have announced more than $50 billion in combined write-downs.

EV sales fell more than 30% in the fourth quarter, after a $7,500 federal tax credit that had juiced U.S. sales expired in September. ... 

Automakers’ retreats and massive write-downs have come as Republican lawmakers abolished a lucrative federal tax credit for EVs last fall, while also doing away with federal fuel-efficiency mandates. Even with federal support, EV demand was below expectations. ...

Ford Motor blames tariff timing and fires at an aluminum plant for earnings miss when it was its electric vehicle business

 

Ford reports worst quarterly earnings miss in four years, guides for better 2026

 

... On an unadjusted basis, the company’s net loss of $8.2 billion last year was its largest since the Great Recession in 2008, according to FactSet. That included $15.5 billion in special charges during the fourth quarter largely related to a pre-announced pullback in its all-electric vehicle plans.

Automakers commonly exclude “special items” or one-time charges from their adjusted financial results to provide investors with a clearer picture of their core, ongoing business operations.

Ford reported a fourth-quarter net loss of $11.1 billion, or a loss of $2.77 per share, compared with net income of $1.8 billion, or 45 cents per share, in the same period in 2024. Adjusted for the one-time charges, the company reported earnings of 13 cents per share.

 

Redesigned Ford Expedition, an ICE vehicle which gets 18/19 combined mpg, sees best sales in 21 years

Ford’s redesigned three-row Expedition SUV is seeing explosive growth.

The Detroit automaker reported Wednesday that it sold 8,724 Expeditions in August, up 53.7% from the same time last year and marking its best sales in 21 years. It’s sold 61,022 of the vehicles so far this year, a 13.1% increase from the same period in 2024. ...

More. 

Ford Motor F-150 Lightning EV pick-em-up-truck sales are a JOKE, and the mainstream media propaganda stories don't tell you that, if they cover the story at all

  Ford sold 7,162 units of the Lightning in Q3 2024, up from the 3,503 units in Q3 of last year. ... Year-to-date, Ford sold 22,807 F-150 Lightning EVs. ... 

[22,807 units lol. Ford sold nearly 751,000 F-series pick up trucks in 2023, so that's like 3% of the 2023 total]

Overall, Ford’s all-electric vehicle sales in the third quarter of this year amounted to 23,509 units, up 12.2% from last year’s 20,962 vehicles. Year-to-date, Ford sold 67,689 EVs, up 45% compared to last year’s 46,671 units. ...

Ford sold 432,429 combustion-powered vehicles in the third quarter, down 2.8% year-over-year, and 1,340,139 units year-to-date, down 1.8% year-over-year.

Reported here. 

That means year-to-date total EV sales are just 5.05% of total combustion-powered vehicle sales year to date.

People aren't buying these dogs.

None of these stories mention these facts.

CBS: Ford to pause production of F-150 Lightning electric pickup trucks

CNBC: Ford to halt production of electric F-150 Lightning next month until January

MarketWatch: Ford to Pause Production of F-150 Lightning EV Pickup Trucks

Reuters, to it's credit actually reported some actual numbers: Ford to halt production of F-150 Lightning EV pickup trucks for six weeks :

Ford said this month its Ford-brand U.S. EV sales are up 45% this year and sales of F-150 Lightning more than doubled to 7,100 in the three months ending Sept. 30 - thought [sic] they still represent just 3.6% of all F-Series pickup sales.     

If Ford is smart it will abandon this boondoggle which is going to cost it $5 billion plus in 2024 and even more going forward and just stick with hybrids and hope Donald Trump fixes this mess.

Ford Motor loses $1.22 billion on electric vehicles in 3Q

 Ford’s “Model e” electric vehicle unit recorded losses of $1.22 billion during the third quarter — less than it lost a year earlier, largely due to lower volumes and cost cuts.

Ford CEO Jim Farley told investors Monday that the company continues to believe in its EV strategy; however, the automaker has pulled back on many investments in the vehicles to focus on hybrid models.

More.

Ford Motor sells 1.5+ million vehicles year to date, 67,689 of them EVs . . . 4.5% of the total 😂

 

The third-quarter results for Ford contributed to a 45% increase in EV sales this year through September to 67,689 units. That compares with GM on Tuesday reporting EV sales of 70,450 units through September, including a roughly 60% year-over-year rise during the third quarter. ...

Ford’s U.S. sales this year through the third quarter were up 2.7% compared with a year earlier to more than 1.5 million vehicles sold. 

More.

EVs represent just 4.9% of GM's 1.95 million vehicles sold year to date.

Meanwhile the top selling vehicles of 2023 were pick'em up trucks. The Ford F-series was numero uno at 750,789 units, followed by the Chevy Silverado at 543,780 units.

CNBC's enthusiasm for the tiny EV component competition between the big two, separated by 2,761 EV units, is . . . comical.

Biggest news of the day: Ford Motor bets Trump will win, scraps $1.3 billion investment in Canadian EV HUB, plans $3 billion Super Duty gasoline and diesel engine truck plant instead lol

 

 

 Ford to spend $3 billion to expand large truck production to a plant previously set for EVs

UBS’ Joseph Spak was among the analysts to applaud the additional investment in the highly profitable Super Duty models compared to money-losing EVs amid slower-than-expected adoption of electric cars and trucks.

“We believe this shows management’s confidence in more sustainable demand for Ford Pro vehicles,” he said Thursday in an investor note. “The [internal combustion engine] investment over EV investment should be viewed positively.”

Ford had previously announced plans to invest $1.3 billion into the Canadian plant for EV production. Those plans included a new three-row SUV, which the company recently delayed until 2027.

The announcement comes weeks after Farley said full electrification of “big, huge, enormous” vehicles such as Ford’s Super Duty trucks was “never going to make money.”

 

Ford Lightning review by Scotty Kilmer: Not Suitable For Towing on a trip, takes 3 days to charge at home, range plummets when cold, battery exposed to the elements will corrode, yada, yada, yada

 But it comes with a Frunk!

Ford lost $132k on each EV: Joe Biden mandating electric vehicles will simply bankrupt the car companies and require huge future bailouts

 

Ford’s electric vehicle unit reported that losses soared in the first quarter to $1.3 billion, or $132,000 for each of the 10,000 vehicles it sold in the first three months of the year, helping to drag down earnings for the company overall.

Ford, like most automakers, has announced plans to shift from traditional gas-powered vehicles to EVs in coming years. But it is the only traditional automaker to break out results of its retail EV sales. And the results it reported Wednesday show another sign of the profit pressures on the EV business at Ford and other automakers. ... And that means this is not the end of the losses in the unit - Ford said it expects Model e will have EBIT losses of $5 billion for the full year.

More. 

Ford really, really, really doesn't want to go down that path lol, or that other one.

I mean, who wants to be the butt of every truck joke when electric ones literally can't pull their weight, giving new meaning to Found On Road Dead?

The Real Fascist Threat To America Comes From The Left, But Only Because It Won

 

Dennis Prager, here:

[I]f there is a real fascist threat to America, it comes from the left, whose appetite for state power is essentially unlimited. But because the left has so long dominated American intellectual, academic, artistic, and media life, it has succeeded in implanting fear of the right. ... First, it does not mean, or have anything in common with, Nazism. Nazism may have been a form of fascism. But Nazism was a unique form of fascism and a unique evil. It was race-based and it was genocidal. No other expression of fascism was race-based. And not all fascism is genocidal. So my fear that the American left is moving America toward an expression of fascism in no way implies anything Nazi-like or genocidal. ... Second, it is not liberals or liberalism that presents a threat of fascism. It is the left. Liberals of the 1940s to 1970s such as John F. Kennedy, Harry Truman, Hubert Humphrey, Henry "Scoop" Jackson, Daniel Patrick Moynihan and so many others were not leftists. They were liberals.

------------------------------------------------

I beg to differ in most of the particulars while seconding the main point.

The advent of fascist elements in American life specifically as a phenomenon of the left has gone hand in glove with the advance of liberalism under Wilson, FDR and Lyndon Johnson, in addition to the fact that the left won World War II, not the "right", whatever that is. One can hardly explain the growth of the state to its current proportions nor its growing oppressive reach without that liberalism and its spokesmen's early admiration for people like Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin. Nor can one explain our alliance with left socialism in joining the war on the side of Stalin apart from a natural affinity for that form of it as opposed to the other. "Fear of the right" is an artifact of the victory of Stalin and FDR over Hitler and Mussolini, but should more correctly be styled "fear of right socialism". 

Nor is it conceivable to imagine the rise of liberalism in America without the revolution in theology which immanentized the eschaton in the social gospel movement. For Marx religion may have been the opiate of the people, but to Spengler it was the very grandmother of Bolshevism. Russia and Germany went to war as developed rival socialisms while the majority of Americans resisted becoming involved in a fight where they had not yet a dog. They were still children in the classroom of The State. But now that we have grown up we routinely invade in the name of "freedom" because we have come to believe it is our destiny to impose it everywhere we can while ensuring cradle to grave security for one and all at home.

That's not to say America hasn't been fertile ground for fascism from the beginning, quite apart from the dominating influence of a psychology derived from Christianity and its tendency toward totalitarian-like moral conformity. But that involves the economic history, which Prager doesn't address. The contemporary corporatist model lauded by Wall Street has its roots planted comfortably deep in our origins in English colonialism, going all the way back to the crown's banking operations on behalf of the sea-trading companies. Many of the original American colonial charters were patterned on this model of state sponsorship and were first and foremost state-capitalist business ventures. So it should come as no surprise that American capitalism after independence has become more crony than capitalist as it has gotten so very long in the tooth. You can take the Tory out of England, but you can't take the England out of the Tory. Jeffrey Immelt of GE in his admiration for the Chicoms is no different than Henry Ford in his for Hitler.

Lastly, it is troubling to me that a person such as Dennis Prager, who is a student of communism, doesn't mention the fundamental bloodthirstiness inherent in all socialisms, whether communist or fascist. The "unique" evil of Nazism shouldn't blind us to Stalin's anti-German crimes anymore than it should blind us to Stalin's crimes against Ukraine and the millions "disappeared" during his purges. And where is the serious reflection on left socialism's responsibility for the many millions of Chinese who perished at the hands of Mao, who specifically imitated Stalin? And perhaps more to the point for us, the fact that as fascist socialism advances in America millions of unborn children have paid and continue to pay everyday the price for it, all in the name of "freedom"?

FORD = Fascist Obama Reelection Debacle

FORD Wimps Out Again, Pulls Anti-Bailout Ad After White House Intimidation

And Daniel Howes for The Detroit News sums it up this way, here:

Ford supported the bailouts before Congress, in public statements and still does today, despite the recurring snarkiness you hear around its offices in Dearborn that it "didn't take the money."

No, it didn't. But Ford did seek a line of credit from the feds, borrowed billions under a government program to "retool" its plants and effectively failed first. That's why it recruited a superstar CEO from Boeing Co. and gave him some $23 billion in borrowed money to save the Blue Oval from bankruptcy.

Or it would have taken the money, too.