We 'Totally Would've Done It Differently': Ford CEO On The Failure Of The F-150 Lightning

"I mean, look, we didn't know what we didn't know," he says. The F-150 Lightning was a lesson the company had to learn the hard way.

Ford F-150 Lightning Hero

Photo by: Ford

Rob Stumpf

By: Rob Stumpf

Mar 4, at 10:34am ET

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In a recent interview, Ford CEO Jim Farley talked about the lessons learned from the F-150 Lightning.
Farley said that he "totally would've done it differently" given what Ford knows now.
The brand's next EV venture in the U.S. will address these lessons, including pricing.

There was a moment not that long ago when automakers had this shared grand vision that electric pickup trucks were the way to convince skeptical Americans that EVs are the future. The hype was volcanic and waitlist was massive—remember how big the Cybertruck reservation list was?

When reality showed up, the Big Three and Tesla had to face it. It turns out that giant EV pickups probably weren't the best products to get batteries in millions of suburban driveways. Ford CEO Jim Farley admitted in a recent interview with Car and Driver that the Blue Oval would have taken a completely different approach, knowing what he knows now.

Ford F-150 Lightning Concept Art

Photo by: Ford

"I totally would've done it differently," said Farley in a response to a question about the F-150's failure to meet anticipated demand. "I mean, look, we didn't know what we didn't know."

To be fair, the F-150 Lightning didn't crater. It was the best-selling electric truck on the market for most of its time in production. It exists. It works and does what a pickup truck is supposed to do. Customers love them. But it failed to become that electric tidal wave that Ford and fans anticipated when it first launched the truck.

Ford aggressively ramped up production capacity to meet the demand that it expected out of the Lightning. That was an expensive, complicated process. Eventually, the consumer demand just kind of fizzled until production of the current-gen truck ended in December 2025 (just three years after it first began).

Part of the issue was the price. Farley said that Covid proved to be a "false signal" that allowed automakers to sell vehicles at prices "30 to 40% higher" than they could pre-Covid—if you could build it.

Ford F-150 Lightning leaving assembly line

Photo by: Ford

"I guess it didn't take us long to learn that our internal-combustion-engine prejudice was so high that we hadn't designed the [electric] cars right," said Farley. "We had a Mustang [Mach-E], we had an E-Transit, we had a Lightning, and people loved these products. The problem was they were never going to pay the cost we put into the vehicle."

Farley said that when the automaker ripped apart a Tesla after hiring Doug Field, Ford's chief EV, digital and design officer who carries previous tenure at both Apple and Tesla, he was "absolute flabbergasted." It turns out that the wiring harness alone was 70 pounds heavier than that of the Mach-E and a mile longer (1.6 kilometers) than the Tesla.

"We didn't know what was going on in [Tesla engineers' ] minds. But now we understand," Farley recalled. "They had no prejudice. We had prejudice. We'd gone to our supply-chain person and said, 'Buy another wiring harness.' [Tesla] said, 'Let's design the vehicle for the lowest, smallest battery.' Totally different approach."

Separately, I recently spoke with a source who works at another major automaker who talked about the exact same scrutiny when tearing apart a Tesla. The source told me that Tesla engineers scrutinized over every penny-pinching detail, leading to decisions at the automaker as intricate as how far apart to place harness clips on the vehicle body in order to save fractions of a cent per vehicle. This sort of mindset is exactly what Farley is referencing.

Ford's strategy has shifted immensely and the brand is recalibrating for a whole new audience. Rather than focus on the age-old "value-over-volume" approach that has served brands well in recent years, Ford is now pivoting to cater to consumers who want to purchase lower-priced EVs. Its upcoming $30,000 EV pickup looks to fill that pricing void that the CEO mentioned in the interview

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This also means being more deliberate on how it deploys capital into its platforms. It's still investing billions in batteries and software, but now Ford is cutting costs and potentially being more strategic on how it ramps up production (unlike the F-150 Lightning, where it expanded manufacturing capacity based on hype).

Sure, the Lightning may not have been the market flash that Ford expected, but as Farley quickly found out, the automaker learned the lesson the expensive way. And sometimes in this industry, it's the only way that the old guard can learn it.

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