It is clear that the electric vehicle (EV) market is not what it once was. Legacy automaker Ford (F) is currently running afoul of that point, with the very real possibility that the F-150 Lightning may be no more. But Ford is not planning to go quietly, hoping that the $30,000 EV line will help things out. Investors were a bit less sure, though, and sent shares down almost 1.5% in Thursday afternoon’s trading.
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There are serious problems with the entire EV market, and electric trucks in particular are hit hard here. Depreciation is egregious for electric trucks, reports note, and incentive pricing is all but required to get them out the door. Consumers welcomed the F-150 Lightning because of its higher profile; most EV models tend to sit lower to the ground, but the Lightning was higher up, and could draw a lot more customer attention.
But even as customers were paying attention, they simply could not bring themselves to pull the trigger, likely owing to a combination of high initial expense and steep depreciation. But with the upcoming change to Ford’s lineup, featuring that lower-cost EV, the end result might be that Ford can win some of that business back.
No Excuse for the Excape
Anyone who looks at Ford model names, particularly in the SUV market space, notices a pattern almost immediately. The Excursion, the Expedition, the Explorer…all of these are basically exploration-related words that start with E-X. But there is one notable difference in this pattern, a real combo-breaker. That is the soon-to-be-defunct Escape, which kept the exploration pattern but parted ways with the E-X convention. At least, that was how it turned out.
New reports say that, originally, Ford was devoted to maintaining that E-X naming convention. How devoted? Sufficiently devoted that they were prepared to name their car a deliberate typo. Originally, Ford planned to call their car the Excape. This was, noted former marketing manager Leo Williams III, “…around the time hip-hop was becoming popular and automotive names were getting more creative.” But, as Williams put it “…my bosses got bogged down in the fact that it wasn’t a real word they could find in a dictionary.”
Is Ford Stock a Good Buy Right Now?
Turning to Wall Street, analysts have a Hold consensus rating on F stock based on two Buys, nine Holds and two Sells assigned in the past three months, as indicated by the graphic below. After a 21.5% rally in its share price over the past year, the average F price target of $12.14 per share implies 8.62% downside risk.
