(AIER)—In August, Ford announced it was spiking its plan to roll out an all-electric three-row SUV, citing low consumer demand and a crowded market.
“We’re seeing a tremendous amount of competition,” John Lawler, Ford vice chair and CFO, told journalists in a conference call. “In fact, S&P Global … said that there’s about 143 EVs in the pipeline right now for North America — and most of those are two-row and three-row SUVs.”
The news that Ford was scrapping its SUV EV came just a month after the company announced a manufacturing pivot at its plant in Oakville, Ontario. The plant, which had been earmarked for EV production, was shifting production to Ford’s F-series pickups, its flagship gas-powered trucks.
“The move,” the New York Times reported, “is the latest example of how automakers are pulling back on aggressive investment plans in response to the slowing growth of electric vehicle sales.”
The Cost Problem
Ford’s latest pullback from EVs is no surprise to people who’ve been paying attention to the EV market.
More than a year ago I pointed out that news outlets were reporting of EVs “piling up” at dealership lots because of low consumer demand, which ultimately prompted Ford to halve production of its popular F-150 Lightning, reducing output to about 1,600 vehicles per week.
The reality is both lawmakers and Washington and auto companies severely misjudged consumer demand for EVs, which has proven far lower than estimates had projected. There are many reasons for the low demand, but the primary reasons are concerns consumers have with EVs.
Price is one factor. Research in recent years has indicated that despite government subsidies, EVs typically cost on average between $5,000 and $10,000 more than a similar gas-powered vehicle. That EVs are more expensive than gas-powered cars may surprise few readers, but what’s less known is that the price gap is widening.
“EV prices aren’t just going up; they are rising faster than inflation…faster than [internal combustion engine] vehicle prices” Ashley Nunes, a senior research associate at Harvard Law School, testified before Congress in 2023, noting that the inflation-adjusted average price of a new EV had risen to over $66,000 in 2022, compared to $44,000 in 2011.
The Charging Problem
Cost, however, isn’t the only concern of consumers.
An overwhelming percentage of Americans—77 percent, according to a 2023 survey led by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago—have concerns about how they would charge an EV if they bought one.
These concerns are not baseless. In February, the New York Times profiled a man Michael Puglia who had recently bought a Ford F-150 Lightning and said it was the “coolest” vehicle he’d ever owned.
“It’s unbelievably fast and responsive,” the Ann Arbor, Mich., anesthesiologist told reporter Neal E. Boudette. “The technology is amazing.”
The problem was the vehicle’s range. When the weather grew colder, Puglia found that the distance his vehicle could travel fell dramatically. His faith in the $79,000 truck dampened, and he found himself wondering if he should sell it.
“People say ‘range anxiety’ — it’s like it’s the driver’s fault,” Puglia told the Times. “But it’s not our fault. It’s actually they’re not telling us what the real range is. The truck says it’s 300 miles. I don’t think I’ve ever gotten that.”
The range problem of electric vehicles is exacerbated by another challenge facing EVs: a lack of charging stations. Nationwide, there was 68,475 private and public charging stations at the beginning of the year, according to the Department of Energy. That’s more than twice the number in 2020, but it’s still just a third of the number of gas stations and far below projections.
The range problem of electric vehicles is exacerbated by another challenge facing EVs: a lack of charging stations. Nationwide, there was 68,475 private and public charging stations at the beginning of the year, according to the Department of Energy. That’s more than twice the number in 2020, but it’s still just a third of the number of gas stations and far below projections.
One reason charging infrastructure has lagged is due to the federal government’s incompetence. Nearly three years ago, the U.S. Departments of Transportation and Energy announced a $5 billion spending effort to build fleets of charging stations to lead “an electric vehicle revolution.” As of the summer of 2024, just seven charging stations had been built.
“That is pathetic,” said US Sen. Jeff Merkley, a Democrat from Oregon. “We’re now three years into this … That is a vast administrative failure.”
Of Profits, and Losses
The decision of automakers to bet big on EV adoption was in some ways rational, in that they were responding to powers in Washington that were pressuring them and incentivizing them to expand electrical vehicle production. But the costs of listening to industry experts and politicians in Washington instead of consumers — and profits — have been severe.
In August 2023, NPR reported that Ford CEO Jim Farley was charging ahead with its ambitious EV expansion even though the company was “losing money on each EV it sells” and consumer demand for EVs was plummeting. Farley’s reasoning was that Ford was attracting new customers, but it was a costly endeavor. Ford reported a loss of $4.7 billion on EV sales in 2023, roughly $40,525 per vehicle sold.
“If the great mass of consumers dislike purple cars with green polka dots, then a society based on private property will not waste resources in the production of such odd cars,” wrote economist Robert Murphy. “Any eccentric producer who flouted the wishes of his customers and churned out vehicles to suit his idiosyncratic tastes, would soon go out of business.”
Murphy wrote these words more than twenty years ago, but in a sense they describe Ford’s business strategy. By producing mass amounts of pricey EVs that consumers didn’t want and selling them at a loss, Ford was in a sense cranking out green polka dotted cars. It was a losing strategy and path to going out of business.
Ford’s massive pullback from EVs is part of a broader return to economic reality. Companies flourish in a free market economy not by serving bureaucrats but consumers, the true “bosses.”
“They, by their buying and by their abstention from buying, decide who should own the capital and run the plants,” Mises wrote. “They determine what should be produced and in what quantity and quality. Their attitudes result either in profit or in loss for the enterpriser.”
Automakers bear responsibility for their decision, and paid the price in the form of losses. But this misallocation of resources likely could have been avoided if not for the federal government’s hamfisted attempts to coerce Americans into EVs, which included not just taxpayer-funded subsidies, but overt pressure from Washington and federal regulations designed to phase-out gas-powered cars.
Fortunately, the centrally planned EV revolution now appears dead in the water, or at least in full retreat. A spokesman for Kamala Harris recently told Axios the presidential candidate “does not support an electric vehicle mandate.”
Forcing Americans into EVs was always a bad idea economically, but it now appears to be a bad idea politically, too.
That’s good news for Ford and American consumers.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
