By Brian Denton, August 13, 2025
Ford CEO Jim Farley recently announced plans for an American-made EV pickup starting at $30,000. If there’s a company least likely to pull it off, it’s Ford. Still, the statement marks a rare admission: the age of the internal combustion engine is ending.
EV technology—range, efficiency, battery density—is advancing faster than the gas engine can keep pace. Farley says Ford will slash costs with radical new production methods, turning existing plants into “mini gigafactories.” Translation: the company is scrambling to catch up.
China’s EV makers have spent two decades building AI-driven, fully automated gigafactories. Ford thinks it can replicate that in two or three years. Why the decades-long delay? Panic.
Farley’s slick, Apple-style presentation masked deeper cracks. Days earlier, Ford recalled 150,000 F-150s because someone forgot to tighten the rear axle hub bolts. If the current assembly line can’t handle a few critical fasteners, a state-of-the-art EV plant sounds like fantasy.
The Economic Headwinds
And the headwinds are brutal. Inflation—driven in large part by corporate price gouging—will push costs higher. Trump’s tariffs are just another tax passed to the consumer. Meanwhile, U.S. household debt is at $18 trillion, national debt at $37 trillion, against a GDP of $28 trillion. For decades, corporate America has squeezed wages, making workers poorer while enriching shareholders.
Then there’s the geopolitical storm. BRICS is rising, with the Global South trading in their own currencies, aiming to break the dollar’s global dominance. History shows such moves end badly for those who try—Gaddafi’s Libya being the cautionary tale. But BRICS isn’t just a threat; it’s an economic counterweight that could shift wealth back to where it originated thousands of years ago.
Against this backdrop, Ford’s mythical $30,000 EV is pure Kabuki theatre. But it’s also a signal: even Ford knows the EV era has arrived. Whether it can survive it is another question entirely.