Then they didn't take it while competitors did, and were suddenly stuck with caving in to government-enabled union demands to have janitors make $50 an hour while Ford stock took off. They didn't have bureaucrats wanting to sign off on every decision the way General Motors did.
One of the Biden administration's pet projects was to mandate electric cars, by telling car companies they had to produce them - or else. Car companies did. Like ethanol, Democrats mandating a cause doesn't make it popular, but people getting paid by subsidies are happy and everyone else knows to go along or suddenly they'll have armed marshalls kicking in their door.
Wealthy elites will still be able to buy high-profit electric trucks, thanks to the bizarrely named Inflation Reduction Act, which caused food costs to increase 44% and forced poor people to get second jobs, which the government reframed as "full employment" and a sign that, along with the stock market boom, meant the economy was great. Image: Ford
Because the sales were mandated and subsidized, some tried to pivot to really expensive ones. Let's face it, you are not getting solar panels or an electric car unless you are rich or can't do basic arithmetic.(2) Even that hasn't worked because government doesn't mandate which company you have to buy them from, so China started getting into the Biden Stimulus piggy bank also.
Ford just spent $1.3 billion, which translate to $132,000 for each of the 10,000 vehicles it sold in Q1 of this year, and they wouldn't write off such a huge sum if they didn't know it was only going to be worse. So Ford is pivoting, canceling "plans" for a $1.9 billion expansion of electric cars and moving to hybrids instead, where there is a lot less anxiety about the lack of charging stations - because the Biden administration has yet to devote trillions of dollars to mandate and subsidize those. The Biden administation even promised to give them $9.2 billion and Ford has so little confidence they can make a profit in electric cars they don't want to take the money.
(1) Government scientists learn to do this also. President Obama was so convinced that a weedkiller was killing aquatic wildlife he made EPA conduct not one but two SAPs right after the product had been re-registered. Scientists diligently analyzed the same product three times in a few years span knowing it was a political stunt that kept them from doing real work.
President Biden was more successful in his war on science. He put in a new EPA head who got rid of scientists entirely and replaced them with epidemiologists. They are guaranteed to "correlate" a chemical to some harm or another if you select the right people. And that worked. EPA then went to court and basically sued itself to overturn its own findings on the weedkiller so they could replace it with a much lower level that had nothing to do with science, but epidemiologists said did not "suggest" any harm. The new level is so low that any usage would exceed it.
Ban accomplished.
(2) The joke about solar panels has always been they are great for the next owner. Despite what you chose to believe, most owners are never breaking even on them and buyers pay $0 more over comparable houses for them. The joke about electric cars is on you if you are the second owner.
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