Earlier this year Hackett announced that Ford would boost its profit margins to 8 percent by 2020 and have forty new electrified vehicles on the road by 2022. Those deadlines slipped, as did earnings—off 37 percent in the third quarter of 2018—and the stock price, down 20 percent since Hackett took over. Perhaps the new CEO has a trick up his sleeve that he will unleash on shareholders and journalists in 2019. But it’s also possible that the shift from Ford Smart Mobility to running the whole show has forced him to come to terms with Ford’s real value: the pickup truck.
“Ford, more than any other brand, is a truck brand—a pickup truck brand,” AutoTrader senior analyst Michelle Krebs told the Detroit Free Press in June. The occasion for the comment was Ford’s announcement that it would stop selling cars—with the exception of an iconic, low-volume muscle car, the Mustang. For Ford it’s trucks all the way down. The F-150 pickup truck has been the bestselling vehicle in the US for thirty-five years and earns the company ten thousand dollars of profit per vehicle. The F-150’s fuel economy tops out at twenty-two miles per gallon on the EPA’s combined city/highway test; in most configurations the trucks struggle to hit twenty miles to the gallon, and the larger F-250s are so thirsty that the EPA doesn’t dare rate them. And while the Mustang convertibles that live in airport rental car lots make twenty-three miles per gallon, a true muscle-car version only hits nineteen. Those sound more like yesterday’s fuel economy numbers than tomorrow’s. But, for now, yesterday is where the money is.
Hackett is walking a tightrope, promising the capital markets plenty of future-y stuff while continuing to sell people what they actually want right now: big, luxurious machines that are cheap to drive when gas is below two dollars a gallon. Although F-150s can top seventy thousand dollars, the pickup retains the Model T’s reputation as an honest machine of the American heartland. “As a vehicle, it was hard working, commonplace, heroic and it often seemed to transmit those qualities to the persons who rode in it,” E. B. White wrote of Henry Ford’s Model T in 1936. So it is—or at least so it seems—with the F-150.