Ford CEO Jim Farley has acknowledged the understanding of the slower growth came into the picture last year when Tesla slashed the pricing on its vehicles as pent-up demand was satiated; that triggered a series of sticker cuts on EVs throughout the market, including on the Lightning and Mach-E. It revealed how challenging the business is going to be, Gjaja said. Ford lost $4.7 billion on its Model e division last year and expects to lose another $5 billion to $5.5 billion in 2024.

"A lot of OEMs are struggling, and Tesla has been willing to discount to drive volume," Gjaja said. "Collectively, the pricing in the market is really, really challenging on EVs, and it just speaks to our need to get more and more efficient, whether it's to compete with Tesla or to compete with U.S. OEMs or foreign OEMs that might come here with really efficient EVs."

The goal is to make Model e profitable. Traditionally, larger vehicles have meant bigger margins for automakers, but with EVs, it's the opposite because larger vehicles require bigger batteries, the most expensive part of an EV, Ford Chief Financial Officer John Lawler said on Tuesday at the Bank of America Securities Auto Summit.

For the automaker's next generation of EVs, Ford will have a smaller platform that will underpin new vehicles that will start as low as $25,000. A special "skunk works" team in California designed it with development practices used by Chinese automakers to turn out new models quickly. Although the platform is smaller because it doesn't have a large engine, the interior of an Edge-size vehicle can be more like an Explorer.

"We're moving into the early majority, and the early majority is much less forgiving, and pricing is an issue," Lawler said. "We don't believe the game is going to be really won with larger vehicles. We think it's going to be in the smaller, more affordable vehicles."

Pursuing zero, zero, zero

Crosstown rival GM went all-in on battery-electric vehicles until recently announcing it'll have plug-in hybrid options for the North American market. Executives now say the automaker will be led by the customer.

But back in 2019, its Cadillac luxury brand announced that most if not all of its vehicles would be all-electric by 2030, a goal brand leader John Roth said stemmed from GM's mission toward zero crashes, zero emissions and zero congestion. The Detroit automaker aspires to be all-electric by 2035.

"Fast forward from that time horizon to where we are today; nobody ever expected it to be a straight line," Roth told The News. "I wouldn't say there's any change in our overall vision. We still are on a mission to achieve zero, zero, zero. We're just working through the zigzag line that is the auto industry to get there."

GM previously withdrew its 2022 target of 400,000 production EVs by mid-2024, but Chief Financial Officer Paul Jacobson said this week at the Bank of America Automotive Summit that GM was "on track" to hit its 200,000-to-300,000 EV production goal for North America this year.

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