Following one of the toughest years in its modern history, Ford Motor Co. is recalibrating its sustainability strategy — focusing on hybrids rather than plug-in electric vehicles, building a new “Universal EV Platform” and creating a new line of business for battery energy storage.
Ford is “evolving our electrified vehicle strategy to match changing customer needs and market conditions,” Executive Chairman Bill Ford and CEO Jim Farley wrote in Ford’s 2026 Integrated Sustainability and Financial Report, released on April 30. That evolution features a buffet product strategy that includes hybrids, “extended-range electric vehicles” (which have a small gas motor that recharges the electric engine), fully electric vehicles and internal combustion cars.
The company lost $8.2 billion in fiscal year 2025 on record revenue of $187.3 billion. Those results included special charges of more than $19 billion related to its EV business.
In response, the company has tempered its short-term EV goals while not abandoning its long-term sustainability aims. Ford still aims to be “carbon neutral” by 2050, said Mary Wroten, Ford’s director of global sustainability since 2024, in an interview.
“Our North Star hasn’t changed,” Wroten said. “What’s changed … is the short-term approach we’re taking to achieve our longer-term aspiration.”
Larger forces
Like all major automakers not based in China, Ford has been buffeted by tepid EV sales, whipsawing policies in the U.S. coupled with drastically tightened reporting requirements in the E.U., and growing competition from Chinese EV makers whose low-cost products dominate in many developing markets.
Around 22 percent of light-duty vehicles sold in 2025 in the United States were to some degree electrified — i.e., hybrid, battery electric or plug-in hybrid vehicles — up from 20 percent in 2024, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, but well below earlier forecasts for EV sales growth. A total of 1.5 million plug-in EVs were sold in the U.S. in 2025, according to Argonne National Laboratory, a four percent drop from 2024.
Sales of plug-in EVs spiked in the second half of 2025 before falling sharply after federal tax credits expired at the end of September.
The bright spot: hybrids, which now make up close to 13 percent of all vehicle sales in the U.S. Rising sales suggest that hybrids offer a gateway to increased levels of electrification and technological sophistication, said Wroten.
Consumers “will get more comfortable with the level of technology of the products, and then they’ll want to shift from a hybrid to an E-REV, or an E-REV to an EV,” she said.
A universal plant
Announced last August, the Universal EV Platform is meant to enable a new, more affordable class of vehicles, beginning with an all-electric pickup truck, priced around $30,000 and estimated to hit the market in 2027. The project team, including designers from the manufacturing, product development and supply chain teams, plus a smattering of former Formula One engineers, optimized aerodynamics, battery technology, body materials and manufacturing processes to squeeze both emissions and dollars out of the end product.
“The skunkworks team out in California, they too
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