Ford CEO Jim Farley knew the EV pain would be bad, but the ‘punch line’ is a $4.8 billion loss: ‘The customer has spoken’

For months, Ford Motor CEO Jim Farley warned anyone who would listen that the electric vehicle transition was about to hit a wall, starting in September, when he predicted that the expiration of federal tax credits would cut the EV market in half. He said EVs would remain a “vibrant industry” but predicted they were “going to be smaller, way smaller than we thought.”

The turning point was what Farley called a “game changer”: the end of the $7,500 consumer incentive from the federal government...