The Death of the Ford Tradition

ne hundred and fourteen billion. That’s how much Ford, GM, Stellantis, Mercedes, VW, Rivian, and Lucid have lost on electric vehicles since 2023.

Ford alone has sold 410,000 EVs at a loss of $36.3 billion—nearly $89,000 per vehicle. Read that number again. Eighty-nine thousand dollars lost on every single car that rolled off the lot. These aren’t startups burning through venture capital on a moonshot. These are some of the companies that built the American automobile industry. And they’re hemorrhaging money on cars the government told them to build.

The EV push was never about market demand. It was about compliance. And compliance doesn’t require profitability—just obedience

I know this story from the other side. Not from a spreadsheet or a policy paper, but from a family photo album that sits in a binder held together with ring clips and typewritten captions. My great-grandfather, Harold G. Short, spent his entire adult life building Ford’s brand in small-town Ohio. His story is the story of what Ford used to mean—and what corporate America has lost.

Around 1916, H.G. Short started working on Model T engines at Newton Davis’ Ford garage in Marion, Ohio. Davis was the first Ford dealer in the area. In a photograph from that era, H.G. is on the left side of the workbench, bent over a Model T engine and transmission, his lifelong friend Dever “Dee” Imbody on the right. A third man, unidentified, stands in the center watching. H.G. was maybe twenty years old. He was learning a trade that would define his life, his family, and his town for the next half century.