Ford is willing to spend as much as $20 billion to reorganize its business to manufacture more electric vehicles.
The automaker is also reportedly thinking of spinning off some of its EV business as a special acquisition company or SPAC to attract more investment.
Ford to Invest More in Electric Vehicles
According to Bloomberg, Ford has stated that it would spend $30 billion on electric and autonomous vehicle development by 2025.
Ford is putting former Apple and Tesla executive Dough Field in charge of the reorganization, including switching its factories from gas-powered to electric vehicle production and hiring more engineers.
Ford is currently in a race against its rivals as the auto industry struggles to catch up to Tesla, the most valuable automaker in the world and the top seller of EVs.
While Ford sells more F-series trucks annually than Tesla's entire production, investors have rewarded Elon Musk's vision of an all-electric future with a higher share price and more confidence about the automaker's prospects, according to The Verge.
Jim Farley, the CEO of Ford, is trying to change the narrative to show that the car company can compete with its rivals.
Ford announced that it was doubling its upcoming electric pickup truck, the F-150 Lightning, and tripling production for the Mustang Mach-E, expecting to reach more than 200,000 units per year by 2023. Ford's electric delivery van, the E-Transit, will go on sale this year.
Ford will join GMC and Rivian as the only car companies with an electric pickup truck on the market, given that Ford ships the vehicles on time.
Meanwhile, Tesla's Cybertruck has been moved to 2023, and CEO Elon Musk has said his company won't begin manufacturing them in massive volumes until next year.
Ford's Plan to Spin Off its EV Business
As far as a potential SPAC, Ford is considering spinning off a small piece of its EV business and may focus on lower-volume vehicles. GM reportedly was mulling an EV SPAC for some time before coming out against the idea, according to CNBC.
SPACs have cooled in popularity as many of the EV startups that have gone public through reverse mergers have drawn criticisms from federal regulators.
The Security and Exchange Commission or SEC is investigating the SPAC mergers that turned Canoo, Lordstown Motors, and Nikola into publicly-traded electric vehicle startups.
The agency has been focused on the validity of the financial projections these companies made when they announced the mergers and claims made about the preorders collected for their cars.
The person who is rumored to be put in charge of the shift is Doug Field, who served as the vice president of special projects at Apple, where he was the de facto head of the company's efforts to create an autonomous electric car, known as Project Titan.
Field had a previous stint at Apple, where he was once the vice president of Mac hardware engineering. Still, he resigned in 2013 to move to Tesla and become chief vehicle engineer, where he helped oversee the development of the Model 3 sedan.
Field left Tesla in 2018, and he rejoined Apple the same year.
Related Article: Ford, Rivian Cancels EV Project Ventures to Create a New Car; Michigan Automaker to Go Solo
This article is owned by Tech Times
Written by Sophie Webster
