Ford and GM's Gas and Diesel-Powered Trucks Aren't Going Anywhere Soon American Automakers Continue to Invest in Internal Combustion Engine Vehicles

By Gary Gastelu (FOXBusiness) General Motors and Ford both have their feet firmly on the gas pedal. Even as they commit tens of billions of dollars toward future electric vehicle development, they’ve been making major investments in internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles that they plan to build into the next decade.

So far this year, GM has announced more than $2 billion in spending to build new full-size trucks and SUVs and a new generation of V8 engines that will power them.

"The ICE age is not over," GM President Mark Reuss told FOX Business at GM’s most recent investor day event."We’re not going to abandon our internal combustion engine segments," Reuss said. "We’ve got truck leadership with GMC and Chevrolet. We’ve got it across our midsize trucks, our full-size trucks and then beyond."

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Ford has gone so far as to separate the company into new divisions, with Ford Blue dedicated to ICE and hybrid models and Model e focused solely on electric vehicles.

"In Ford Blue, the team is focused on capitalizing on our red-hot product lineup," Ford CEO Jim Farley said during the company’s first-quarter earnings call, referring to top-selling models like the gas and diesel-powered versions of its best-selling F-Series truck lineup.

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"In essence, in the U.S., internal combustion engines will be important in larger vehicles for at least another decade2, and a huge percentage of profits for GM, Ford and [Ram parent] Stellantis come from full-size pickups, large SUVs and heavy-duty pickups that will be hard to replace with electric vehicles," said Mike Ramsey, vice president/analyst of automotive and smart mobility at Gartner.

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Ford F-Series sales are so strong that the lineup could be a Fortune 100 company by itself, and General Motors generates approximately $7.5 billion in pretax profit on its trucks annually, according to Automotive News.

Farley has argued that battery power isn’t suited for the sort of long-haul towing Ford’s F-Series Super Duty trucks are often used for, which is one of the reasons the brand hasn’t committed to going all-electric until the technology is ready to support every customer’s need.

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"In the meantime, automakers are continuing to develop and support internal combustion vehicles," said Tyson Jominy, vice president of data and analytics at J.D. Power.

"ICE vehicles have several advantages to consumers, but to automakers their biggest advantage is that they are highly profitable, particularly for trucks and SUVs. Models that are already in market, that are built at existing plants and with existing technology, are helping to fund R&D into EVs, which have the opposite business profile. EVs are mostly new models and platforms built in new plants because the technology of batteries is new in the automotive world. All of that is expensive, and that means EVs are inherently risky."

Jominy compares the transition to the way U.S. automakers recently cut sedans from their lineups in favor of SUVs and trucks.

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GM expects to have an annual global output of over 2 million EVs per year by 2025, with half that capacity in North America, while Ford is aiming to hit the 2 million mark in 2026, including a 600,000 annual U.S. capacity. Both of those figures standing against U.S. and global total sales that typically run in the 15-17 million and 70-90 million ranges.

"It’s likely that at least half of the U.S. market in 2030 will still be ICE vehicles, so that’s still a generation or two that needs investment or updates," Guidehouse Senior Research Analyst Mike Austin said.

"From a global perspective, developing markets will take longer to transition to electrification, so it’s smart to invest now before the volume decreases."

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"EVs still need body panel stamping and paint shops, just like ICE vehicles." READ MORE; includes VIDEO

FORD TRUCKS HELPED DRIVE SALES UP 10.7% IN MAY AS EVs SLIP

Alternative Fuels and the Future of Internal Combustion Engines (HDT Truckinginfo; recorded webinar)

Excerpt from Washington Post/Bloomberg: The bankruptcy of Lordstown Motors Corp. is, in one sense, almost numbingly straightforward: Five years into existence, and having burned through more than $1 billion, it had delivered a sum total of six electric pickups.(1)

Getting the range to a decent level mostly means installing bigger batteries, which also add more weight, raising the cost.

Consider the Ford F-150 Lightning, the electric version of its marquee model. As Kevin Tynan of Bloomberg Intelligence points out, the sticker price was slightly below $40,000 when orders launched in January 2022, but that has since jumped to almost $60,000, with an average transaction price of around $85,000. Rivian Automotive Inc.’s R1T starts at about $73,000. Forthcoming electric trucks from GM and Tesla aren’t likely to be cheap, either.

Even with bigger batteries, having your vehicle do much more than just drive you from A to B can seriously cut into the advertised range. Drivers of any type of EV will be familiar with what cranking up the air conditioning for an extended period can do to how far you can go on a charge. But loading up a truck or having it tow something — ostensibly what pickups are there for — seriously limits range. In one towing test conducted by Car and Driver last summer, the Lightning, the RT1 and GM’s Hummer EV saw their regular ranges cut to about 100-140 miles, much lower than the 200-300 that seem more palatable to drivers.

Moreover, fleet owners, along with pickup drivers who do use them to haul stuff around, value the backing of an established brand with a large maintenance network.

At a starting price north of $60,000 but with a range of only about 200 miles, Lordstown was asking a lot of a purchasing manager to switch away from a similarly-priced F-150 running on gasoline.

Rivian, which is very much going for the cool, electrified off-roader, has a better vehicle but, more importantly, a contract to build delivery vans for Amazon.com Inc., which is also the company’s largest shareholder. Even with that backing, Rivian’s market cap has collapsed to less than $14 billion from a peak of $153 billion. Ford is doing well with the F-150 Lightning, capitalizing on the brand and touting features like being able to power your home in a blackout. Even so, Ford had sold only about 20,000 of them in total by the end of the first quarter (compared with more than 663,000 other F-Series trucks over the same period). READ MORE