Ford F-Series Pickup Sales Fall
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Ford Motor Co.’s F-Series pickup truck sales dropped in the second quarter as the automaker slowly rolls out a redesign of its top-selling model to avoid quality problems and recalls.
Sales of the F-Series, Ford’s biggest moneymaker, declined 6.1% in the April-to-June period and are down 8% this year. It was the model’s third straight quarterly decline. Ford held about 60,000 redesigned F-150s in the first quarter for extra quality checks, which CEO Jim Farley said helped the new truck avoid 12 recalls.
“We saw better F-Series sales in Q2 as we continue to roll out F-150, which gave us a 30% increase over Q1,” Said Deep, a company spokesman, wrote in an email. “We had a lot of F-150 in transit” to dealers. “We expect that growth to continue into Q3.”
The F-Series has an outsized influence over Ford’s overall sales, with the nearly 200,000 trucks it sold in the second quarter accounting for 37% of the automaker’s total vehicle deliveries. Ford’s overall sales rose 1% in the second quarter.
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Farley is on a push to improve quality and reduce warranty repair costs that hit $4.8 billion last year.
Holding the F-150s “hurt our first quarter,” Farley told Wall Street analysts on the company’s April 24 earnings conference call. “But we’ll benefit because we’re shipping those now in the second quarter.”
The electric F-150 Lightning pickup, which Ford stopped shipping in the first quarter due to an unspecified quality issue, saw sales surge 77% in the second quarter. But the 7,902 Lightnings Ford delivered to customers in the second quarter accounted for just 3.9% of overall F-Series sales. Ford has slashed prices and cut production of the Lightning as part of a pullback on EVs as mainstream car buyers balk at high prices and a spotty charging infrastructure.
