Ford F-150 Lightning Production Put On The Backburner As Gas Trucks Make More Money

• Ford has paused production of the F-150 Lightning electric pickup.
• The automaker is trying to recover from losses associated with a fire at an aluminum supplier’s factory.
• The company said it will prioritize the gas and hybrid F-150 and F-Series Super Duty trucks because they use less aluminum and are more profitable.

Production of the Ford F-150 Lightning, America’s best-selling electric pickup truck, has been put on hiatus as the Michigan-based automaker is trying to minimize losses linked to a fire that happened last month at an aluminum supplier’s factory in New York.

At the same time, the company plans to “significantly increase” production of the gas and hybrid F-150 and F-Series Super Duty models because they use less aluminum and are more profitable. The company wants to increase output by more than 50,000 trucks in 2026 compared to the previous guidance.

Ford F-150 Lightning production

Ford will add up to 900 new jobs at the Rouge Complex in Dearborn, Michigan, where the F-150 is built, and 100 new positions at the Kentucky Truck Plant in Louisville, where the F-Series Super Duty is assembled.

The car maker said that all of the hourly employees at the Rouge Electric Vehicle Center, which handles F-150 Lightning production, will be transferred next door to the Dearborn Truck Plant to join a newly added third crew that helps build gas and hybrid F-150s.

As for the fate of the Lightning, Ford doesn’t have a specific date for the production restart. “We have good inventories of the F-150 Lightning and will bring Rouge Electric Vehicle Center (REVC) back up at the right time, but don’t have an exact date at this time,” spokesperson Ian Thibodeau told TechCrunch.

Ford’s electric pickup has been America’s best-seller for quite some time, but digging deeper into the numbers reveals why Ford chose gas and hybrid trucks to bring in higher profits. The company sold 10,005 F-150 Lightning EVs in the third quarter, a healthy 39.7% increase year-over-year, but nowhere near the 207,732 F-Series trucks sold during the same period.

Many automakers dived head-first into the electric pickup game, hoping they would bank on America’s insatiable appetite for pickups. But the market hasn’t responded as enthusiastically as companies had hoped, with sales figures of electric trucks nowhere near their gas-powered counterparts.

Production of the Ford F-150 Lightning has been paused or scaled down several times since the model started rolling off the assembly line in 2022. The same has happened to some of General Motors’ electric trucks, while Ram recently decided to cancel the upcoming all-electric 1500, focusing on an extended-range version instead.