Ford CEO Jim Farley took a swipe at Tesla CEO Elon Musk on Wednesday as he introduced a serious funding in solar energy. The commentary was meant to attract a comparability between Tesla’s long-delayed Cybertruck and Ford’s F-150 Lightning plug-in pickup.
Farley was talking at a Ford plant in Michigan to announce a cope with DTE Power that each corporations billed as “the biggest renewable vitality buy from a utility in U.S. historical past.” However after touting the corporate’s shift to extra sustainable sources, he made a swift assault on his important rival within the electrical automobile house, which he has praised previously for serving to to push the trade towards electrical automobiles.
“We’re really on a mission at Ford to steer an electrical and digital revolution for the various, not the few,” Farley mentioned. “And I’ve to say that the shining mild for us at Ford is that this lovely lightning bolt made proper down the street in Dearborn, proper right here within the state of Michigan, already the chief of all EV vans in our trade in the USA.”
He added: “Take that, Elon Musk.”
First introduced in 2019, the Tesla Cybertruck was initially supposed to enter manufacturing in 2021, however Musk mentioned it is going to now begin in mid-2023. In the meantime, the F-150 Lightning is at the moment the best-selling electrical truck available on the market , beating out the one different two entrants, the Rivian R1T and the GMC Hummer EV.
Farley’s remark was probably meant as a lightweight dig at Musk, who additionally used the Ford F-150 as a benchmark by which to measure the Cybertruck’s energy and efficiency. (Tesla posted a video in 2019 of a tug-of-war between the Cybertruck and an F-150, with the electrical truck simply outrunning the Ford pickup.)
In fact, Tesla outsells Ford by a large margin, holding roughly 75% of the electrical automobile market. The Tesla Mannequin three and Mannequin Y are the 2 best-selling electrical automobiles within the US, adopted by the Ford Mustang Mach-E — nevertheless it’s a distant third, with 6,734 Mach-E deliveries within the first quarter of 2022, in comparison with 46,707 for Mannequin three.
The photo voltaic deal goals to place Ford as a number one power in renewable vitality. Below the deal, DTE Power will add 650 megawatts of solar energy to Michigan for Ford — the equal of powering 14,000 properties. The set up will improve the overall quantity of photo voltaic vitality within the state by practically 70 %. And Ford mentioned that by 2025, all the electrical energy the corporate makes use of to make its automobiles in Michigan shall be matched with renewable vitality purchases.
“It is a strategic funding in Michigan to assist us get clear vitality on the grid sooner,” Farley mentioned at a information convention. “We do not have to depend upon oil worth spikes in enterprise cycles to keep up full employment.”
So far, Amazon has claimed to be the biggest world purchaser of renewable vitality. Earlier this 12 months, the e-commerce big introduced a number of new tasks aimed toward growing its portfolio by practically 30%, from 12.2 gigawatts to 15.7 GW. By comparability, Ford’s announcement at this time represents simply zero.65 GW. Google beforehand mentioned it was the “largest company purchaser” of renewable vitality.
Additionally, saying “buying carbon-free electrical energy” is completely different from truly utilizing that renewable vitality. Critics observe that these claims are sometimes exaggerated as a strategy to bolster an organization’s inexperienced vitality bona fides, pointing to analysis that has discovered company actors typically do not lower as a lot air pollution as they declare.
