🛻 If you haven’t looked at Ford lately, look again

The pickup truck has fundamentally shifted in American car culture. Once an effective workhorse primarily marketed to businesses and trades for its utility, the trucks have mutated, from hyper-functional, stripped down vehicles to aspirational purchases priced at levels attainable only for the upper middle class, stuffed with sophisticated technology and creature comforts. That’s what people are buying, so that’s what automakers are selling.

That said, a growing set of evidence indicates that this auto niche is leaving behind a lot of possible customers. This thesis has been borne out in a number of emerging competitors to the flagship Ford pickup truck, the F-150, including but not limited to:

• Chinese automobiles, mostly electric, that have been driving circles around American autos overseas. 

• Stateside competition from the likes of Slate Auto, the Jeff Bezos-backed startup that has promised a $25,000 customizable electric pickup, which is premised on the observation that cars are mostly built today for the top 30% of the market, and is instead choosing to target the other 70%.  

• Tesla, which has its own direct competitor in the oversized and expensive status symbol pickup truck segment in the Cybertruck. 

Ford’s first attempt to address some of these competitors, the F-150 Lightning, missed the mark and led to a $19.5 billion charge in December. 

Beset on all sides, Ford’s not going to have a lot more chances to win. That’s one reason the company has been preparing the Universal Electric Vehicle platform, which will allow the company to build EVs more efficiently on the same production lines, in a strategic shift that the company describes as essentially turning the assembly line into an “assembly tree.”

Ford has announced the first vehicle built on that platform will be its new electric pickup truck, dubbed the Fathom, that will hit the market starting at $28,350. That list price is nearly half the cost of the average US sales price of a new vehicle in June, and is only slightly more expensive than the average used car.

The Takeaway

This comes at a financial inflection point for the automobile business in general and the EV business in particular. Used EV prices have been increasing in 2026, defying the gravity that usually hangs on used car prices amid high gasoline prices from the Iran war.

The sticker shock from high auto prices has had some significant reverberations around the economy as well; the average MSRP of a new vehicle in June 2026 was $51,394. With interest rates still well above their post-pandemic lows, car loan terms that were once unthinkable — well past the standard four years, stretching even as high as eight years — have become downright common. That’s why the sub-$30,000 price point is so compelling: Ford’s either got to find a way to sell cars to the middle class again, or the likes of China and Slate Auto are going to do it for them. 

— Walt Hickey

The non-profit Värmlands Vikingacenter in Sweden rented one of their replica Viking ships, the Glad av Gillberga, to a movie project from Universal called Charlie’s Tale. According to the center, the ship was returned damaged, requiring $41,000 in repairs that the studio has not paid. This is an issue, because Charlie’s Tale was in fact the code name for The Odyssey, which has grossed $988 million worldwide. 

• Vistra, Take-Two, Canopy Growth, OKLO scheduled to publish quarterly results premarket. July non-farm payrolls report released at 8:30 a.m. ET.