Ford’s CEO Jim Farley recently went on a 1,100-mile road trip in an F-150 Lightning pickup with one major mission: understand the EV ownership experience. Over those miles, he picked up some pearls of wisdom that will likely influence the future of Ford’s Model e electric vehicle program. Among them is why Ford made the deal it did with Tesla and how charging anxiety, not range anxiety, is the real problem EV owners face.
Farley’s trip spanned Nevada and California as he made his way to Monterey Car Week 2023. Upon arrival in the Golden State, he caught up with The Kilowatts, a clean energy advocate at Laguna Seca Raceway. His personal experience during the trip wasn’t a totally pain-free experience, he admitted.
It turns out that some of the challenges we recently experienced during our test drive of the Audi Q8 e-tron aren’t too different from the ones Farley mentions. “I learned a lot. I don’t think I’ll ever use the range anxiety phrase again because what I saw was charging anxiety,” he said. “As we move from the evangelist to the mainstream in EV… we’re getting into customers who are very uneducated… we have a huge human problem to solve.”
That education problem is one that can’t be solved simply by flooding the market, he says: “We can build all the vehicles we want, we can make them profitable but at the end of the day, people don’t understand how to handle the charging experience, how the vehicle will perform, real-world range in cold, towing…”
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Speaking about when he visited one of the largest charging stations in the nation he said that “the Tesla people were in their cars, they weren’t talking to each other at all… they’re watching streaming content… and then there’s all the rest of us… There’s Ford, and Hyundai, Kia, and Polestar and we’re all talking to each other.”
The big difference is how easily Tesla customers can just roll up, plug in, and charge without worrying about the details. “We’re using Charge America and there’s maybe one 350 kW charger, the rest are slow speed, a lot of people have never done it before, and we’re all trying to figure this out.
“I figure maybe we need a brand ambassador program, and I’m sure glad we did that Tesla deal… All the Ford people retrofitted, get an adapter and an app on their phone that’ll allow them to connect to a Supercharger Network,” Farley said. It’s not just the Supercharger network that drove that shift either. According to Farley, issues with the CCS plug were a large part of the problem.
“When Doug Fields came to the company a year and a half ago, we started having this debate about the plug itself, whether this committee design plug is competitive with the Tesla plug. We all started having plug failures and we’ll run them over and they’re broken and all sorts of stuff happen. And it became really clear to all of us as leaders that’s (NACS) a better solution. It was engineered better. I hate to say it, but it was.”
The entire interview is an interesting one that’s worth a watch as Farley clearly sees a path forward that improves the EV experience for all Ford customers.