As sales of Ford Motor Co.’s E-Transit electric vans have grown, the automaker’s commercial team has increasingly looked for partnerships focused on charging infrastructure, Ford Pro CFO Navin Kumar said.
Speaking at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference on Sept. 10, Kumar said local government agencies and the U.S. Postal Service have accounted for two-thirds of the more than 8,000 E-Transit sales Ford has booked so far. (That 8,000 figure is up more than 75% from 2023.) Those customers, Kumar added, have found it easier to build business cases around the smaller geographic footprints they cover—and thus, the easier time they have charging their vehicles—as well as the tax credits they can collect under the Inflation Reduction Act.
But the story so far has been different for larger corporate customers looking to bring a significant number of electric vans and pickup trucks to worksites that can have wildly varying needs.
“We’ve gotten hundreds of hundreds of customers, but the ramp has been more deliberate and methodical than we originally expected,” Kumar said. “A large portion of that is the charging. They want to derisk charging before they scale.”
For Ford Pro, that means ramping up education and training efforts as well as doing more to help customers identify use cases, Kumar said.
“But the big challenge is charging. So we are now having more charging partnerships to address that,” he said. “The bottom line is it is a more methodical and deliberate ramp-up of EVs and commercial fleets than we had initially expected.”
