Ford’s retreat from electric vehicles is not merely a corporate pivot; it is a confession of surrender to a political economy that devours long-term survival for short-term profit.

Jim Farley’s vision of a Ford EV future now reads like a requiem for an idea already declared dead by Washington. Thousands of hours of human labor—engineers, designers, planners—are wiped away with a $19.5 billion accounting stroke.

The promise that electric vehicles might remake American manufacturing collapses under the weight of policy choices engineered to protect fossil capital and appease an aggrieved industrial base nostalgic for the internal combustion engine.

For years, Farley warned that competing with Tesla and China’s EV juggernauts was existential. He was right. But existential threats cannot be met with market slogans alone. When the Trump administration stripped EV subsidies and loosened emissions standards, it signalled that the U.S. state would no longer even pretend to plan for a post-carbon future.

The result was predictable: EV sales in the U.S. cratered, investment fled, and Ford haemorrhaged billions trying to sell vehicles the market had been politically conditioned to reject.

Ambition vs Influence

The illusion of globalization—the fantasy of a single car, a single supply chain, a single world—has evaporated. Ford’s vaunted “One Ford” has fractured into many Fords: gasoline trucks for an American market addicted to them, and electric vehicles for Europe and China, where governments still understand that industrial policy shapes destiny. This balkanization of production resurrects costs the industry believed it had buried decades ago.

What remains is a grim balancing act. Ford will milk profits from gas-powered trucks at home while struggling abroad against Chinese automakers that enjoy state backing, scale, and strategic coherence. Partnerships replace vision. Cancellations replace confidence. One last electric truck, promised for 2027, is held up like a talisman against irrelevance.

Electric vehicles are not going away. But without government support, without industrial strategy, and without the courage to confront entrenched interests, America will watch the future be built elsewhere—and import it later at a premium.