I hope the Mach E does well, the more EV's the better for all of us. But much remains to be seen. I've owned several Fords and a Ford built in Mexico by Mexican workers, sold and serviced by Ford dealers doesn't fill me with confidence. We'll see once it actually hits the road. I think it will fill a niche for those who want to go electric but want the car to look and feel like the ICE cars they are used to driving, not like a car from the future.
I'm not convinced this isn't just a compliance vehicle, doesn't seem like Ford is all in when it comes to EVs. It seems to me that any legacy car maker who isn't actively manufacturing a line of EVs by 2025 is going to be relegated to an also ran in the marketplace. For legacy manufacturers inertia is a terrible thing. Their lack of vertical integration hurts them in many ways. Tesla certainly leads the pack when it comes to vertical integration, followed by VW, then Toyota, with all the rest far behind. The CEO of Porsche, discussing VW's software issues, said his cars had more than 40 different components purchased from suppliers that had their own computers and softwares, and it was a daunting task to make all that work seamlessly with the vehicle's own software.
The other side of the supplier issue is that the legacy manufacturers outsource all kinds of components, but for the most part they make their own engines in house, they are engine manufacturers. For the legacy automakers to really buy in to electrification, they will have to convert these factories to EV production, simpler to manufacture and more amenable to robotic manufacturing. That means dealing with the UAW, a corrupt organization (earlier this year three UAW presidents were going to prison for corruption). So the US legacy manufacturers have to make the change and still somehow get the approval of the UAW to do it. Not impossible. VW is doing it, and they arguably have a more difficult task since their unions are even more powerful, they hold 50% of the seats on VW's board. But they are begrudgingly going along with the CEO in changing over their factories to the tune of nearly $10 billion USD because he is the one pulling them out of the hole into which VW dug itself with dieselgate. Mercedes says it has eight EVs coming and is converting their factories, BMW says the same, but again time will tell, only VW has actually made the jump.
VW's CEO has said their id.4, a sweet EV that is likely to be very successful in the market, isn't a competitor to Tesla. It's a competitor to the Rav4 and the CRV because that's where the big market lies. They get it. Not sure Ford gets it.
I see the CEO of Toyota, Mr Toyoda, just announced that EVs were being hyped too much. It was part of their launch of the new version of their hydrogen powered Mirai. It's a really nice looking vehicle, built on the same platform as the Lexus LC500. But it has Prius acceleration at about 9 seconds 0-60, so not all that impressive when it comes to performance. He also made the bizarre claim that the hydrogen infrastructure was sufficient. Really? There are currently 43 hydrogen stations in California, 1 in Hawaii, that's sufficient? Toyota certainly isn't all in.