(CNN) — Ford is the undisputed global leader in pickup trucks. The F-Series is the best-selling vehicle in the US – of any kind – since 1981. Its latest pickup, the Ford Fathom, will cost a downright cheap $28,350, which should set it up to be a massive seller.
And it absolutely needs to be.
Ford has spent billions beyond the usual costs developing the Fathom ,a smaller electric pickup truck that goes on sale in 2027. But there is no current US market segment along the lines of electric pickup smaller than a regular truck but still with room for a family of five.
If it bombs, it’s not just money down the drain. The truck becomes a cautionary tale.
“Despite the small footprint of the vehicle, the implications are huge,” Ivan Drury, director of consumer insights for Edmunds, told CNN.
Coming out with any new car can typically cost a major company around $2 billion, but the research and development to bring such an inexpensive EV to the market has taken much more than that.
The Fathom – and the cars descended from it – has already cost Ford around $5 billion.
Then there’s the low price. Unlike luxury cars, which can be sold for multiple thousands of dollars more than they cost to be assembled, cheap cars need to sell at extraordinarily high volumes to make the same amount of money.
That is enough pressure to put on one little pickup truck. Now add in the fact that it’s all-electric, in a segment that simply does not exist in the United States.
“It’s a big bet for Ford, for sure,” Emma Bergg, a spokesperson for Ford, told CNN.
The Market
Ford has been down this road before.
When it was announced in 2021, the Ford F-150 Lightning was supposed to make the EV as mainstream as, well, the Ford F-150. Originally priced at $40,000 in the first half of 2022, Ford expected to sell them hand-over-fist.
But by 2023, that base price had jumped to nearly $60,000. Would-be buyers, skeptical of new technology and a high price, responded accordingly. Sales never climbed higher than 33,510 units in 2024, and Ford ended production of the F-150 Lightning in December 2025.
And things have only gotten tougher for EVs since then.
The Trump administration and Republicans in Congress eliminated a federal tax credit of $7,500 for EVs last October. EVs tend to be expensive, too, with Cox Automotive reporting that the average electric car sold for $56,238 in June, nearly $7,000 more than the average car overall.
Eliminating the tax credit didn’t kill the EV market entirely, however, and EV sales in the US actually rose 15% from the first quarter to the second quarter of this year.
Drury and Bergg both maintain that the better analogue for the Fathom is not the electric F-150 Lightning, with its large frame and accordingly large price tag.
It’s the Ford Maverick, a small pickup truck that went on sale in 2019 and comes in both gasoline and hybrid variants. It starts at $28,145 – just $200 cheaper than the upcoming Fathom – and sold about 155,000 units last year.
That might seem like Polly Pocket numbers compared to the 800,000 Ford F-Series trucks sold in 2025, but raw numbers don’t tell the whole story.
Ford has sold out its Maverick production run for multiple years in a row, accordingly, Drury said.
“You could look at the Maverick as probably the greatest success story of the past decade,” Drury said. “Any way you cut it, the vehicle has outperformed everyone’s expectations.”
The Maverick’s core customer isn’t a traditional pickup truck buyer but someone who might be coming over from an equally affordable car, like a Honda Civic.
Ford CEO Jim Farley told Fast Company in April that he sees a lot of growth in the lower end of the market.
“Everything that we’ve seen with escalating fuel prices in the US is reinforcing our choices,” Farley told Fast Company.
The car of the future?
For Ford, the Fathom is not just about selling as many of them as it can now, but showing where the company is going.
While Ford has scaled back plans for EV production, the company hasn’t abandoned them entirely.
The Fathom is the first product built on what Ford calls the Universal Electric Vehicle platform, which will be the basic architecture for producing multiple upcoming electric cars, from compacts to vans, Bergg said. That should help to make up for some of the Fathom’s development costs.
And even though the Fathom is aimed at the lower end of the market, it’ll have numerous features to help appeal to those buyers from other brands.
It’ll have a big screen. An optional battery pack should take its range to over 300 miles. Every Fathom, even the most barebones, will have the hardware and sensors necessary to turn on BlueCruise, the company’s software that enables drivers to take their hands off the wheel while on the highway.
And Ford’s Bergg took pains to emphasize that its low price wasn’t coming from where customers would notice. Instead, it’s a result of those manufacturing processes that Ford spent billions developing.
“Affordability is a big company priority right now, not just in the electric vehicle part of the business but across the board,” Bergg said.
The-CNN-Wire
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