Ford’s EV Collapse Is a $19.5 BILLION Taxpayer Failure (And We’re the Real Losers)

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Ford taps out, taps out on EVs. Heard a couple people kind of gloating. I told you it was gonna happen. Yeah, we told you that was gonna happen too, but I’m not bloody gloating because Ford had to take a $19.5 billion write down. That’s like gloating saying, see, I told you my house was gonna get robbed. See, and it did.

We lost, okay? We lost. How many government handouts, loan guarantees, subsidies did Ford get? Did all of these companies get? This your money, it’s my money. We were robbed, we were screwed. They wasted our damn time with this crap. Billions, we’re gonna spend billions on bar, you know, building.

Charging networks and all of this stuff We’re the biggest loser here, do you understand it’s not Ford It’s we the people Why because we’re morons Well, because maybe the country’s got what a 50 % of the country maybe reads at a sixth grade level And we listen to these people in Washington DC that are it’s gonna be the future and we’re gonna have electric vehicles everywhere We’re all gonna die

from CO2, which happens to be what plants crave.

Here’s the story today. $19.5 billion in charges tied to its electric vehicle business.

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Yeah. This is among the largest impairments taken by a company and marks the US auto industry’s biggest reckoning to date that it can’t realize its electric vehicle ambitions anytime soon. And again.

Some of the stuff also happened due to Bush. Bush and Obama would bail it out. The automakers. Man, I know Ford didn’t get a bailout. I know. I know they didn’t. But they said, is what we’re doing. You better listen to Washington, D.C. And then you look at these CEOs. Listen.

I’d rather be honest, don’t know how people do it. I know guys like Jim Farley, the CEO, I don’t even afford, how do you even do this? How do you even go to Washington and sit at the White House with these presidents that don’t know what the hell they’re talking about and dictate to you how you should run your company? I’d give them the flipping middle finger.

Honestly, nobody has a set out there to finally stand up. you’re to be hurting your shareholders. What? You didn’t hurt them anyway? How well is foreign GM stock done going back what? Two, three decades now?

Anyway, Ford lost, I mean, these are serious numbers, 13 billion on its EV business since 2023. It’s gonna bolster its lineup of gas powered vehicles while shifting to hybrid and extended range electric vehicles that include onboard gasoline engines. Here’s the CEO, here’s Jim Farley.

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Instead of plowing billions into the future, knowing these large EVs will never make money, we are pivoting. That’s what you’re calling it. We’re pivoting. Pivot as playing basketball, you your pivot foot. We’re pivoting. We now know enough about the US market where we have a lot more certainty in this second inning of reduced emissions power. Jim, you’re calling this the second inning.

You now know enough about the US market? dude, why do you have your job? Seriously. How is it that I knew more than you did? You’re the bloody CEO of Ford. Who knows how much money you’re getting paid, okay? And now you know, and you’re calling this a second inning?

Regulatory changes and lackluster demand. Regulatory changes means we’re not forcing people, the government is not forcing people to buy cars that they don’t want anymore. And again, thank you Donald Trump for that. Regulatory changes and lackluster demand from Americans are forcing US automakers to abandon plans to quickly step to an electric vehicle future. Yeah, yeah.

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And you’re watching this stuff. yeah, that that Ford F 150 lightning. That’s yeah, that’s going away. That’s going away. That was a joke in the first place. I wrote a column. I wrote a column about electric vehicles and how dumb they were. This is

I don’t know how to be 2006, 2007. I’m trying, I mean, I’m gonna look it up. I gotta have a lot of columns. I’m actually going through them right now, okay. Oh yeah, was actually, no, I’m sorry. It was actually of 2010. The title of the column is the Chevy Illogic. The Chevy Illogic. I wanna discuss a company. This is a company that each and every American owns in our portfolio. Can you guess what that company is?

yeah, if you guessed General Motors, you’re correct. If you’ve either been living on another planet or just awoke from a Rip Van Winkle type of an app, 2009, the president decided to step in, break secured creditors, and basically take over the automaker known as General Motors. I had and still have very serious issues with the actions of our government in regards to General Motors. Simply put, the government is the umpire and referee.

of the auto industry. It’s not fair to the other auto companies that the entity that makes calls the rules is also a player in the game. It’s also not fair that the government decided to take secured creditors and essentially wipe them out, breaking the most fundamental of business law. Again, the amount to this was to bail out unions. This was all conducted under the usual auspices, if we don’t do this, millions of people are gonna be laid off.

We can’t have another company go under. Communities are gonna be destroyed and towns are gonna be destroyed. Remember that whole argument? That was both Bush and Obama. The cases the government was making for their unprecedented takeover were all straw man arguments. Yeah, at the time I happened to own a GM vehicle. The GM vehicle that I owned, I acquired before the government took the company over.

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I love the car. And again, they’re winning awards on these cars. And the funny thing is if General Motors went into bankruptcy, guess what? They’d still be making that car at that time. However, they would have been making that car with a labor agreement that actually mirrored the prevailing market-based wages that Toyota, Honda, Hyundai, BMW, and Mercedes manufacture in the United States.

General Motors ceased being an automobile manufacturing company years ago, instead became a pension and healthcare provider that just also happened to have a side business of making cars. But anyway, make a long story short here, at the time, again, governments involved, okay? Again, I talked about cafe standards, thank God Trump just got rid of those as well. Years in the making, years in hype.

An automobile so ridiculous that it can only be possible due to the meddling of our government and our tax dollars. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Chevrolet Volt. Yeah. Yeah. Did you remember when Barack Obama got in that car, buckled himself in and drove it 10 feet? He actually buckled himself in and drove the car 10 feet. The New York Times.

New York Times called it an electric lemon. Yeah, the car was first introduced in 2007 at the Detroit Auto Show, and at that time the car looked like it was something out of a James Bond movie. It was an attractive car.

Basically, now that changed. right, right, cars are, people are gonna buy it for his looks, they’re gonna buy it because it’s efficient. Right, right. At the time, the car got 40 miles on a charge. That’s it. The starting price was 41 grand, which is as much at the time as a Mercedes-Benz C-Class C350. I could go on, but again.

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The basic basically the car was the same thing as a Chevy Cruze except at the time the Chevy Cruze set you back $17,000 and again it was an internal combustion engine. And all you save money on gas really really $41,000 minus $17,000 $24,000 in gas savings the whole thing was illogical and that was the point behind my column but again that happens with everything when it comes to government. Keep government

out out of the way, keep him out of business. Now I’ve just recently given kudos to Trump and what he’s done with autos and cafe standards and pulling regulations away. But his involvement in other areas of the economy, whether it be with Nvidia, whether it be with Intel, whether it be with US Steel, it’s similar to some degree. State capitalism never works.

Never works. Interesting call about it today. CEOs are learning to live with Trump’s turn to state capitalism. CEOs will adapt and they’ll learn to kiss ass the right way and cut deals with whoever is in charge. But let’s take a look at who has actually executed state-run capitalism. Yeah, Soviet Union, Russia.

You want to go back to the 1990s when you had the Asian financial crisis and that was due to state capitalism and the chaebol that was both South Korea and Japan. It never works.

It never works. The government needs to get out of the way. And again, this $19.5 billion right off, well, we paid to. We paid with our tax dollars. Watchdog on wallstreet.com.