Ford Motor Co. is offering free home chargers and installation to buyers of its electric vehicles in a bid to boost sales and overcome range anxiety among mainstream car shoppers.
The incentive program will begin Tuesday and run through the end of the year, Ford officials said in a briefing with reporters. It’s available on the automaker’s three electric models — the Mustang Mach-E, F-150 Lightning pickup truck and E-Transit cargo van.
The offer is a novel approach to addressing what consumers say is a primary obstacle to purchasing an EV — fear of running out of juice while traveling longer distances. Ford says its research shows that EVs are charged at home more than 80% of the time and it hopes to allay range anxiety by providing chargers in buyers’ garages and driveways that they can use to power up overnight. In that sense, Ford wants consumers to view EVs as filling up more like a mobile phone than a gas-fueled car.
“It’s not range anxiety we’re dealing with, it’s change anxiety,” Martin Delonis, senior manager of strategy in Ford’s Model e EV unit, told reporters. “An electric vehicle fills up when you’re not paying attention — passive fueling overnight, like charging a smartphone.”
Anyone who buys or leases a Ford EV during the promotion period is eligible for a $1,310 charger along with installation, which can run more than $1,000. For buyers whose living conditions don’t allow for a home charger, such as apartment dwellers, Ford is offering a $2,000 cash incentive through its dealers.
While Ford’s 2024 EV sales through August were up 58% from the same period a year ago, they represented just 4.4% of the automaker’s overall US revenue. Chief Executive Officer Jim Farley had earlier said he expects as much as half of sales coming from battery-powered vehicles by the end of the decade, a goal the company has since rescinded.
The slow growth has caused Ford to cut production and prices, as well as cancel and delay new EV models. The automaker projects it will lose as much as $5.5 billion on its EV business this year and is scrambling to develop low-cost plug-in models to compete with cheap Chinese EVs.
— By Keith Naughton (Bloomberg)
