It's been nearly 16 months since Ford Motor Co. split into separate business units for electric and gasoline-powered vehicles.
The company recently restructured its earnings reports to give more insight into the profits and losses for each unit and, in doing so, confirmed what many had long believed: Its internal combustion business is making most of its profits while EVs are deep in the red.
Despite the strong bottom line in the traditional business, called Ford Blue, challenges remain. The company is looking to remove billions in costs that are preventing it from making even more money. Kumar Galhotra, president of Ford Blue, said the company is making progress on those cost-cutting plans but has more work to do.
Galhotra, 57, spoke with sibling publication's Automotive News Staff Reporter Michael Martinez this month. Here are edited excerpts.
Q: You've said Ford Blue is a growth business. How much longer will that be true?
A: We are a growth business because of the strength of our portfolio. Our products are sold out. Bronco and Maverick are in very high demand. F-150 is doing fantastic; it's actually up over 20 percent year over year so far. We're actually going to add capacity for a lot of these products. That's what makes it a growth business in the short term.
We also have a portfolio that is less exposed to this transition to EVs than some of our competitors because of the type of products we have in our portfolio. Bronco is an awesome off-road vehicle, and our Bronco customers are actually using it to truly go off road, go into the desert, and go into territories where you don't see a lot of EV chargers. So that segment is going to move a little slower into the EV transition. Similarly, our pickups. A lot of the pickup owners travel long distances and tow a lot. So until the EV range with towing improves substantially and there is a much broader network of chargers, customers are going to continue to buy our ICE pickups and hybrid pickups that we make.