Ford unveils all-electric SUV to take on Tesla dominance

Bloomberg

Ford Motor Co is reinventing one of its marquee models — the Mustang muscle car — as a battery-powered crossover to become a player in the electric-vehicle market that is expected to take off in the coming decade.
In a splashy ceremony ahead of the Los Angeles Auto Show, the carmaker unveiled the Mustang Mach-E, a swoopy hatchback with distinctive pony-car haunches and familiar shark nose that it claims has the power to take on Porsche. When it goes on sale next fall, Ford hopes to convince mainstream buyers its electrified Mustang is an alternative to the Tesla models dominating the EV market.
And Ford, which exited the battery-car business last year when it pulled the plug on its slow-selling Focus EV, is betting it’s cracked the code on turning a profit on plug-ins. By building the Mach-E in Mexico, where labour costs are low, and with a price starting at $43,895, the automaker says it will avoid the losses automakers typically suffer selling high-cost EVs.
The Mach-E will make a profit “on vehicle one,” Ford Chief Executive Officer Jim Hackett told Bloomberg TV. “That’s surprising a lot of people because electrics have not had a history of making money. This will.”
Hackett said it will turn a profit because the vehicle “creates the passion that follows with Mustang” and prices start in the mid-$30,000 when US subsides on electric cars are factored in. “So it’s attractive to customers.”
Ford is building it in Mexico because it had an open factory there and it needed to be overhauled to build an electric vehicle, Hackett said. “As we start to adopt more electric vehicles — we had capacity down there, we had no capacity in the United States — we’re going to have electric capacity here in the United States. They’ll be building other electric
platforms.”
Still, it’s a high-risk gambit. The Mustang is Ford’s signature sports car, having sold more than 10 million units since it debuted in 1964 with simultaneous cover stories in Time and Newsweek. When Ford decided to abandon the traditional passenger-car business last year, it spared only one model: The Mustang.

New Configuration
For more than half a century, the Mustang has embodied high-octane power and unbridled strength. And Ford will continue to make gasoline-fuelled versions of the classic muscle car.
The Mach-E is not only the first electric version of the Mustang, it’s also the first time it has been configured into a sport utility vehicle. That will test the elasticity of a brand built on low-slung speedsters.
“Calling this a true sports car would be stretching it,” said Jeff Schuster, senior vice president of forecasting for researcher LMC Automotive. “The market obviously has gone in the direction of the SUV body type, that’s what’s selling. But the Mustang is not an SUV. It’s been a sports car.” Ford, having struggled to sell more mundane electric cars, is embarking on a strategy to electrify its icons.

Tesla planning to invest
$4.4bn in Berlin factory
Bloomberg

Tesla Inc plans to invest 4 billion euros ($4.4 billion) in its newly announced factory in Berlin that will produce up to 150,000 cars annually, Bild reported, without saying how it obtained the information.
The first production line at Tesla’s Berlin factory, unveiled by founder and Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk earlier this week, will manufacture the company’s SUV Model Y, which could be produced as early as 2021, according to the newspaper. The electric car maker could receive about 300 million euros in subsidies subject to approval by the European Union, Bild reported.
Musk has until now relied on a single auto-assembly plant in Fremont, California, to build a company that has a market value of more than $63 billion.
The Berlin site is to initially employ 3,000 people, a number that could eventually rise to 7,000, according to Bild.