The Total Failure Of The Ford F_150 Lightning

     Dumb people thought that when Elon Musk said that he wanted to go to Mars and then bought an electric car company that electric cars were the future for Earth. Not at all. Electric cars were a stepping stone for him to get to Mars, and he needs them when he gets there. Did he make billions of dollars to invest in SpaceX by selling electric cars? No. He went public and for no really good reason his stock went to $1,000, split twice, and it still is worth somewhere around $250 for each stock, while stocks from companies like Ford, GM, and Chrysler are only worth $10 to $40, and they actually have a business model that is built around selling cars.

     SpaceX is far more profitable as a company then Tesla ever was, because until 2023 Tesla didn't actually sell that many cars, while SpaceX dominates space launches because of their reusable booster rockets. SpaceX is so dominant in commercializing space launches that by December of 2023 they made the joint space venture of Boeing and Northrop Grumman put their space launch company up for sale due to declining profits, Richard Branson abandoned Virgin Galactic, and Jeff Bezos still can't make orbit on his own with Blue Origin and wants to buy the Boeing/Grumman company, but is blocked by an antitrust investigation. Bezos was also sued by his Amazon shareholders and forced to buy launches from SpaceX for any supposed Amazon satellite array that he wants to deploy to orbit. His pathetic test launch of a rocket at the end of 2023 deploying payloads into the atmosphere used only about 5% of the fuel and rocket needed to get to orbit, something that SpaceX achieved over 15 years ago.

     Elon Musk first made money with PayPal, sold that off, started SpaceX in 2002 but realized that he needed more money and maybe the world needed a few more years, so he became the largest shareholder in Tesla in 2004. Is there any reason the stock went to $1,000? Not really. But Musk took that money and invested most of it in SpaceX and Starlink. Tesla, SpaceX, and the Boring Company are all about designing the infrastructure for what Musk needs on Mars, so he needs solar panels, battery storage systems, and fully electric vehicles for Mars from Tesla, and he needs the Boring tunnel company to build underground cities on Mars, and he needs SpaceX Starships to get people and supplies to Mars.

     In addition to Richard Branson abandoning Virgin Galactic he also abandoned the hyperloop system that Elon Musk wrote a whitepaper on and others rushed to develop during the hyperloop boom a while back. It required a vacuum, so people tried to create a vacuum in a train tunnel and not surprisingly found it hard, but notably Elon Musk never tried to implement a hyperloop here on Earth. Where would a hyperloop system be useful where you wouldn't have to pump the air out to have a vacuum? A hyperlink system would work on Mars because it lacks an atmosphere, and that is probably what the whitepaper was about anyway, and why Musk never attempted it here. The hyperloop is a design for Mars that takes advantage of no atmosphere and much lower gravity, because Mars is only about 15% of the volume and 10% of the mass of the Earth it has only 38% of the surface gravity of the Earth.

     So now Elon Musk makes lots of money off of SpaceX. Both Starlink and space launches are profitable for him, and it appears as if he will spin off Starlink as its own company with its own IPO stock, and also release SpaceX as a separate IPO stock. If he does that you can expect a similar thing to happen that happened to Tesla stock. He became the richest man on Earth simply because of the value of his Tesla stock, and like I said, until 2023 they didn't even sell that many cars, whereas SpaceX dominates space launches, and his LEO satellite system Starlink is now being used by the US military for communications, and Starlink posted more than a billion dollars more profit in 2023 than it did the previous year and is cash positive on its own as of December 2023. SpaceX even without Starlink is also cash positive and very profitable, simply because Musk developed the rocket technology to truly reuse booster rockets, with the record currently held at 19 uses for a single booster.

     And it was Musk that did this, no one else. He is the secret sauce. Because Jeff Bezos established Blue Origin in 2000, Elon Musk established SpaceX in 2002, and Richard Branson established Virgin Galactic in 2004, they have all had at least 20 years now, but Branson has tapped out, Bezos has failed to make orbit, and the only so-called rocketeer billionaire left standing is Elon Musk. So it's not just that the other two lack any particular engineering skills, or that they don't appear to be as high IQ as Elon Musk. It is that no matter what, you cannot just buy your way to space, no matter how much money they threw at it, no matter how many engineers they hired, neither Branson nor Bezos could get a rocket to orbit after trying for over 20 years, but Elon Musk did, and he turned it into not one, but two profitable business ventures.

     Starship is just around the corner, in 2024 they should be using it to actually take things to orbit, at which point it will cost around $5 to $10 a pound to launch something to Low Earth Orbit (LEO). Due to Elon Musk having the only successful private company to make it to space, and being that he already has taken astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS), that needs replacing as well, and a very easy use for 50 Starships is to place them in a ring and to engineer some joining pieces, put some spokes in it, and spin it to create artificial gravity, very similar to the painting by Chesley Bonestell on the cover of the book 2001 A Space Odyssey, and similar to the station depicted in the movie. And the cost for all that? About 2 billion dollars, because the Starships are projected to cost only 20 million each, while the ISS that it would replace cost 150 billion, is tiny, and has no gravity. The Starship ring would be enormous compared to the current station, housing up to 450 people, the artificial gravity would mean that extended stays would be no problem like extended stays in zero gravity.

     50 Starships? No problem. Elon Musk needs hundreds of Starships just to take all of the infrastructure and all of the people to Mars so that he can have a full colony living there of 1 million people by 2050. That's about 25 years. In fact, the exact size and definition of what a Starship is was derived from reverse engineering those numbers, 1 million people living in a self-sustaining fully working colony with all infrastructure by 2050 on Mars, do the math. That's why Starship is the exact size that it is, and they will need hundreds of them to haul everything to Mars in time, but if along the way Elon Musk can make profit off of Starship to continue to pay for the Mars venture by hauling cheaper things to LEO for only $5 to $10 a pound, or by selling 50 Starships as a replacement for the ISS, he will. That's all cash flow going through SpaceX. But again, I do suspect that if he issues SpaceX and Starlink stocks they will go through the roof, and he will be undisputedly the richest person on the planet, times at least 3, and that will fund his venture to colonize Mars.

     Like I said, dumb people thought that electric cars were the future of Earth. And some major car manufacturers produced all electric vehicles, but they're not needed here on Earth. They're only needed on Mars where there are no other sources of fuel like we have on Earth, where we have abundant sources of other fuels. There are no fossil fuels that we are aware of on Mars, and there is not abundant water on Mars either. On Earth we can run cars on gasoline or natural gas, and if we don't want to do that, we can just split water and use hydrogen. There are no oceans on Mars, and no gasoline, so pretty much everything we currently use other than nuclear and solar can't be used, especially for something like a car.

     Tesla cars are only necessary for Mars, but somehow virtue signaling corporations thought that they could market electric cars as somehow “green,” or better for the planet, even though about 80% of all electricity is generated using fossil fuels, so on average an electric car contributes about 80% of the CO2 of gasoline cars, truly not a big difference if you believe in anthropogenic Global Warming or man made Climate Change. And the worst part is when states like California and whole countries or the European Union require absurd things like all vehicles that are sold be electric by 2030 when not even Tesla can turn a profit selling electric cars, at least not until maybe the last year or two.

     The first of the modern electric cars to fail is the Ford F-150 lightning. The first of the big three American auto manufacturers to produce an all-electric vehicle, Ford found that Americans really don't want full electric vehicles, at least not in quantity and Ford was only able to sell 33,000 F-150 Lightnings in the last 2 years, while they regularly sell around 900,000 Ford F-150s a year, meaning the Lightning has accounted for only about 2% of total F-150 sales in the last 2 years.

     What Americans want, if given a choice between a gas engine, an all electric motor, or a hybrid vehicle, Americans apparently want a hybrid, and have been buying up all of the hybrid Ford F-150s and hybrid Ford Maverick pickup trucks at all of the dealerships. The hybrid Maverick now accounts for 56% of all Maverick sales to date, or over 100,000 hybrid Ford Mavericks in the last 2 years, literally three times as many as the F-150 Lightnings, and Ford is not even advertising them. Also not being advertised but being sold is the Ford F-150 Hybrid that also sold over 50,000 units in 2023, compared to only 20,000 fully electric F-150 Lightnings. The hybrid Ford F-150, first introduced in 2021 already accounts for 10% of all F-150 sales in the United States.

     So Ford is reacting by scaling back production of the all electric F-150 Lightning and scaling up production of all hybrids. And all of the other car manufacturers have either experienced the same thing, or are learning from Ford, if they bother to invest in the research and development necessary to produce an electric vehicle, and then only sell 15,000 to 20,000 units per year, electric cars are nothing more than a tiny niche market and most companies will just continue buying credits from Tesla, who again, as of 2020 also didn’t make a profit from selling electric cars, just from receiving credits. Ford plans on spending 22 billion dollars in total between 2020 and 2025 on research and development of all electric vehicles and they lost over 4 billion dollars in 2023 alone, and people are not getting onboard. To contrast the sales of Teslas with Ford electric vehicles, Tesla delivered nearly 500,000 vehicles in the US in 2023. In general, other than Tesla cars, why don't Americans like electric vehicles? Mostly because of a fear of running out of power on long trips due to a lack of charging stations, while hybrids are perceived as being the best of both worlds.

     Toyota has been making the Prius hybrid for over 20 years now, and the Prius is the world's top selling hybrid car with over 5 million units sold in the past 20 years, meaning more Toyota Prius hybrid cars have been sold than all makes and models of Teslas combined. The entry level 2024 Prius claims 56 MPG City / 57 Highway, starts at only $28,000, and comes with Toyota’s famous build quality and a 10 year warranty. Because the future of cars on Earth is not electric only, the future of cars is to create hybrids that still use gas but get better mileage, and then when the gas runs out in 30 years or so they will switch to hydrogen generated off of the tip of South America which can be sold in stations like gasoline is today.

     But in the meantime all of the car manufacturers will react to the Ford F-150 Lightning / Maverick data and the total failure of all other car manufacturers to succeed in selling large quantities of electric vehicles in the United States, and they will all come up with or revive their old hybrid cars, but none of them will have the build quality or the experience of Toyota with the Prius. An indication of perceived build quality is that Toyota stock did a 5 to 1 split in 1982 and 5 more 10% increases since then, and their stock is still worth around $181.

     But Tesla has over 3 times the market capitalization of Toyota, while Tesla has in general been nothing more than a boutique car manufacturer that loses money selling cars. The only reason Tesla posted a profit in 2020 was because of the total of over 3 billion dollars Tesla has received in the last 5 years from regulatory credits that other car manufacturers had to buy from them, because they only made electric cars, and because governments were stupidly encouraging car manufacturers to build all electric vehicles. Car manufacturers had a choice, either build all electric vehicles themselves or just buy credits from Tesla. As of April of 2023 Tesla had only ever sold 4 million vehicles, and it didn't make a profit from selling them, which is a very niche market, so most of the major automakers just bought credits.

     Meanwhile, Elon Musk is clearly focused on SpaceX and really, electric cars were never needed here on Earth anyway, but since he makes more from regulatory credits than from selling cars he continues to build factories that can create the infrastructure for a Mars colony. And electric cars are not particularly better for the environment anyway, it can even be argued they are actually worse for the environment because of toxic waste produced while making the batteries, so they are not “green” either, despite dumb governments trying to create more electric cars under the false pretenses of them being green. They are only a technology that is needed on Mars in 5 to 10 years, along with the Boring company for tunnels and underground cities, the solar panels, batteries, and cars that Tesla makes, and maybe even hyperloops. But the next step is Starship, once that is a reality Musk can start hauling things and people to Mars, because hauling a million people and an entire civilization to Mars means a lot of trips, and time is ticking.