The GT looks great. I’ve increasingly grown to dislike the front without the sport appearance package. GT has it by default but the whole lineup should.

Yea, I like that idea. Maybe a shrunken version of the current Hummer EV SUV, but with removable roof. GM took the shrink down approach with the Hummer H3 20 years ago.  

I always thought it was a play on G-M...

Our MME GTPE is awesome!  We love it!

You could be right, although the wiggle room in affordable + I can’t predict trim mix is why I went to ATP.   What they have inched around on for price makes me think MSRP of base trim will be like $32,500. I don’t see it being higher than $35,000 (the EV Equinox is already like $34,950 or something before incentives). I do think the MSRP of the Maverick probably limits how high they could put the skunk truck; if you could consistently get the Maverick for cheaper with competitive features why would anybody except Tesla conquests buy the skunk truck?

Yep, this is confounding because they know the profit is in a small battery assisting a gasoline based vehicle. PHEVs are not really appealing to US buyers but the hybrid with a 1.1 Kwhr battery is an easy sell to someone in a heavier vehicle than can see the improvement of fuel economy in surface roads, stop/start driving or even at 40 to 50 mph with a bit of variable speed where regen adds efficiency.

Ford loves to use the term “affordable BEV” because there’s a lot more wiggle room with that term than say, low price. And I’ll make the prediction that affordability will be entirely linked to a monthly payment for something a little better being a small increase over what the base model costs. Now how that actually works, I’m not sure but it could be linked to leasing programs to encourage take up as many buyers as possible while giving Ford dealers a ton of off lease two and three year old program vehicles to on sell at dealerships.

A bronco sized Canyon AT4X suv would be pretty cool. Also, if they wanted to go the removable roof route, maybe they could shrink down what they did for the hummer and apply it here too.

Correct, but that decision came later when Ford approached VW with the rebadge in exchange for MEB. The original VW Commercial plan was to replace T6 Transporter and Caravelle with Buzz. The high end Multivan and California moved over to MQB passenger car platform.    Transporter T6 --> ID Buzz Cargo / rebadged Transit Custom Caravelle T6 --> ID Buzz / rebadged Tourneo Custom Multivan T6 --> Multivan T7 California T6 --> California T7

Of course, although I imagine if they start the MSRP around $30,000 for the lower trims they probably can’t get north of $50k for the highest trims. If the idea here is to provide affordable EVs, which probably means cost-competitive with similar ICE, Cox says the ATP of compact SUVs (which even tho the skunk truck is not, if its anything like the maverick it should be basically comparable to a compact SUV) is ~$37k right now. If the capex is $5 bn and the COG for these EVs out of Louisville can be like $28k (which I think is what Tesla does on the Model 3? *A lot* of guesswork here.) then making gross $9k on each EV sold at 100,000/yr puts you at nearly 6 years before you recoup investment before considering sg&a, depreciation, etc.    the breakeven target is 2029, which would mean they want to do it in 2-3 years. My math is of course extreme guesswork and I ignored a lot of shit that could come into play but I imagine they’d need to be somewhere close to 200k/yr to actually meet that, at least above 150k/yr. They could be happy with those numbers since they’d at least justify the investment and replace the sales volume lost from the Escape with products presumably carrying a better cost structure.