{"id":35298,"date":"2025-10-15T07:41:44","date_gmt":"2025-10-15T07:41:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/usa\/former-ford-ceo-says-automakers-went-full-bore-into-making-evs-without-thinking-about-the-consumer\/"},"modified":"2025-10-15T07:41:44","modified_gmt":"2025-10-15T07:41:44","slug":"former-ford-ceo-says-automakers-went-full-bore-into-making-evs-without-thinking-about-the-consumer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/usa\/former-ford-ceo-says-automakers-went-full-bore-into-making-evs-without-thinking-about-the-consumer\/","title":{"rendered":"Former Ford CEO says automakers &#8216;went full bore&#8217; into making EVs without thinking about the consumer"},"content":{"rendered":"<figure><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i.insider.com\/68eeffa6cc993f9955d0373b?format=jpeg\" alt=\"Mark Fields, the former CEO of Ford, is dressed in a white shirt and black blazer.\"\/><figcaption>Mark Fields, 64, was the CEO of Ford from 2014 to 2017. Fields said automakers &quot;went full bore in putting in capacity for EVs&quot; without thinking about consumers.<\/p>\n<p>Michael Loccisano via Getty Images<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<ul>\n<li>Mark Fields joined Ford in 1989 and was the company&#039;s CEO from 2014 to 2017.<\/li>\n<li>Fields said US automakers &quot;went full bore&quot; into making EVs without considering consumer demand.<\/li>\n<li>&quot;This is clearly an issue where the market didn&#039;t develop the way automakers thought,&quot; Fields said.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Former Ford CEO Mark Fields said on Tuesday that US automakers overestimated consumer demand when they started ramping up production of electric vehicles.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;Over the last couple of years, the automakers really went full bore in putting in capacity for EVs,&quot; Fields, 64, told CNBC&#039;s &quot;Power Lunch.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>&quot;They really didn&#039;t have a good discussion on the consumer, in terms of what it was going to take to get the consumer to buy these EV products,&quot; Fields said.<\/p>\n<p>Representatives for Fields did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.<\/p>\n<p>Fields started his career at Ford in 1989 after graduating with an MBA from Harvard Business School. He held a variety of senior leadership positions at Ford, and was the company&#039;s chief operating officer from 2012 to 2014 and its CEO from 2014 to 2017.<\/p>\n<p>Some of the big bets automakers made on EVs have come undone &quot;over the last 18 months or so,&quot; Fields told CNBC.<\/p>\n<p>General Motors said in an exchange filing on Tuesday that it was taking a $1.6 billion charge &quot;based on a planned strategic realignment of our EV capacity and manufacturing footprint to consumer demand.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>The company said it expected the &quot;adoption rate of EVs to slow&quot; after the Trump administration eliminated federal EV incentives.<\/p>\n<p>Under the Biden administration, EV buyers were entitled to a $7,500 consumer tax credit if they bought a new EV and a $4,000 consumer tax credit for a used EV. Both schemes expired on September 30.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;This is clearly an issue where the market didn&#039;t develop the way automakers thought. A lot of them, particularly in GM&#039;s case, boasted that they had the full lineup of EVs,&quot; Fields said on Tuesday.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;And what was an advantage, at least they thought at the time, has now probably turned into a bit of an albatross as the market take-up of EVs is going to be lower, at least in the near to medium term, than they plan for,&quot; he continued.<\/p>\n<p>Auto chiefs have expressed mixed views on whether the rollback of federal EV incentives would hurt the US EV market.<\/p>\n<p>Ford&#039;s current CEO, Jim Farley, said last month that the expiry of federal EV incentives could halve US EV sales.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;I think it&#039;s going to be a vibrant industry, but it&#039;s going to be smaller, way smaller than we thought,&quot; Farley said on September 30.<\/p>\n<p>Former Tesla president Jon McNeill, however, thought otherwise. McNeill said in an interview with CNBC on October 2 that the market can continue to &quot;grow without subsidies.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>&quot;In Europe, France and Germany in particular rolled subsidies off a couple of years ago, and what happened after that, surprisingly, was the market continued to grow,&quot; McNeill said.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;That&#039;s largely because the models continue to roll out from other OEMs, much like they have here,&quot; McNeill added, using the acronym for original equipment manufacturers.<\/p>\n<p>Read the original article on Business Insider<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Mark Fields, 64, was the CEO of Ford from 2014 to 2017. Fields said automakers &quot;went full bore in putting in capacity for EVs&quot; without thinking about consumers. Michael Loccisano via Getty Images Mark Fields joined Ford in 1989 and was the company&#039;s CEO from 2014 to 2017. Fields said US automakers &quot;went full bore&quot; [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35299,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-35298","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-usa"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35298","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35298"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35298\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35299"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35298"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35298"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35298"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}