Ford stock rallies amid F-150 Lightning EV production restart, adapts autonomous driving program
Yahoo Finance autos reporter Pras Subramanian discusses Ford and it's plans to restart production of several different EV's including the F-150 Lightning as well as the companies focus on automated driving assistance features, as opposed to autonomous.
Video Transcript
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SEANA SMITH: Well, let's talk a little bit more about some of the big movers of the week and, more specifically, of today. Because Ford was a mover that's on our radar, ending the day up just about 4%, ending the week up 10%. Now, investors cheering news that the automaker is restarting production of its F-150 Lightning electric vehicle.
The Lightning coming alongside increased output of several other of its electric vehicles. That news hitting today with more Yahoo Finance's Pras Subramanian joining us. And you can clearly see the Street's excited about today's announcement.
PRAS SUBRAMANIAN: Yeah, another bit of good news to end the week, increasing production, like you said. First off, the Maverick and Bronco Sport going up 80,000 units this year. They're projecting that. The Mustang Mach-E EV doubling its run rate to 210,000 for the year for 2023. And that Lightning you mentioned, Ford reiterating that it's on track for 150,000 annual run rate by the end of the year. So they had already [? said ?] that. But now they're kind of reiterating again.
We'll see on this. Because, as you know, they shut down production for about a month with that battery issue. So they're going to restart that.
And hopefully that'll actually catch up and be able to hit that run rate. So altogether, some good news there for Farley and Ford. And, you know, Q1 earnings can't come soon enough because that's when they can kind of show proof that they're actually kind of turning the company around.
- Yeah, that is some big news that's creating a lot of jobs as well. I want to quickly ask you about, they shut down just a couple of months ago Argo. And now we're starting up in that space Latitude. What's the play here in the autonomous driving moves?
PRAS SUBRAMANIAN: So they sort of took a lot of those engineers that they laid off from Argo and brought them back on in house to, in this Latitude AI company and they're focusing more on automated driving assistance features, not so much autonomous. So they think that the feature is cruise and adaptive cruise control, lane departure warnings, things like that. They want to make software that helps the driver, as opposed to taking over fully, is my understanding, at least right now.
- That's a pretty significant shift, so really pumping the brakes, if you will, on fully autonomous.
PRAS SUBRAMANIAN: Yeah.
- I did not read that. OK, Pras Subramanian, excellent take there. Thank you.
