Last year, Ford sold more than 650,000 F-150 pickup trucks, making it the most popular vehicle in the US for the 46th year in a row. Couple that with Americans’ recent thirst for very big cars, and few things say “US of A” like a truck bed and a little blue oval. In 2022, the venerable champ got a futuristic makeover for the electric “Lightning” model and contributed to the surge of EV sales. But this year, Ford is hyping an F-150 variant that might feel like a step back, not forward: the hybrid model with both an internal combustion engine and an electric motor, which only takes over for certain features and under certain driving conditions.
The global car electrification project—needed to eliminate carbon emissions from transport so the world can meet climate goals—and drivers’ unexpectedly healthy appetite for EVs is currently the biggest story in the auto industry. Like other automakers, Ford will have to follow the lead of policymakers, including in California and the European Union, who have pledged to effectively ban sales of new gas-powered cars by 2035. The industry is piling money into new models powered by batteries and the new supply chain needed to make them.
Although car companies are starting to look greener than they used to be, they still want to sell vehicles. Ford says it sees room to compete on more fuel-efficient hybrids—that is, cars that still burn fossil fuels. People who aren’t ready to go—or interested in going—electric “don’t want to be left behind,” Ford CEO Jim Farley told investors in July. “They want modern power trains, and decarbonizing with them is just as attractive to us.”
Ford will quadruple its hybrid sales over the next five years, Farley predicted in July. Today, at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit, Ford executives announced the latest F-150, including the hybrid, which they say has been a surprising success since its launch in 2021. Sales jumped 33 percent last year over the year prior. One in 10 of the F-150s sold in the second quarter of 2023 were hybrids, more than quadruple the number of all-electric Lightnings. (Production issues have slowed the intro of the all-electric truck.)
Ford says it plans to build more Ford F-150 hybrids to meet demand. The company declined to release specific prices but says it will lower the cost of the hybrid truck by nearly $2,000, bringing it closer to the price of its standard gas-powered model and further from the higher price point of the battery-powered truck. The company also reports that, when it comes to the Ford Maverick, a smaller, lighter truck that has gained a cult following, more than half of its US sales this year have been in the hybrid model.
A handful of other automakers seem to see the same opportunity in the ground between gas and battery. Toyota has become a global outlier in its emphasis on hybrid vehicles over those powered purely by battery. It launched its first hybrid pickup in the US in 2021. Fourteen percent of the Tundra pickups it sold last year and 23 percent sold so far in 2023 were hybrid, Toyota tells WIRED. Stellantis, owner of Chrysler, Jeep, Ram, and other brands, will roll out its battery-electric pickup truck next year, and CEO Carlos Tavares has said a pickup with a backup gas engine to extend the range of the plug-powered truck will be soon to follow.
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