You could argue that an “electric car company” is not something that needs to exist, and that car companies should simply be Car Companies, not tied to any particular powertrain. But electric car companies do exist in the U.S. in the form of Tesla, Rivian, Lucid, Polestar, and Slate, and the reason why is pretty obvious: “Electric” was the hottest new term of the last two decades, and a necessary one to raise enough capital to get a new company off the ground. Pitching a hybrid car company to a group of investors would have been as fruitful as the messages I used to send on dating apps. But now it’s 2025, and that hot “electric” term is now lukewarm at best.
A few months ago, I was at a Rivian event in which I asked a representative if the company would ever offer a gasoline range extender. The answer was an emphatic “no.” I asked the same question at a Lucid event and received the same answer. “The future is electric,” is the refrain I typically get from folks when I ask this question. To which I respond: “What’s your point?”
Telling me what the future is doesn’t seem particularly relevant. We could all be driving flying cars in the future, but if you started selling only flying cars today, you’d be a fool. This reminds me of 2022, when GM announced it would skip hybrids because the future is electric. More specifically, per the Detroit Free Press, Mary Barra said:
“GM has more than 25 years of electrification experience including with the plug-in vehicles like the Chevy Volt …From that experience, our vision is for an all-electric future. Our strategy is focused on battery electric vehicles as they represent the best solution and advance our vision for an all-electric future.”
I remember thinking upon reading that: “Sure, the future may be electric, but you’re selling cars now, in the future’s past. Right now, people want hybrids.” As expected, GM backtracked on its plan to offer only EVs and to skip hybrids, and is now going heavy into the hybrid game (while still offering a solid array of EVs).
Too Many Companies Are Splitting Too Small A Slice
The future is electric, but today is not electric. Toyota understood this because they understand consumers, though they got dragged by journalists for not going all-in on the new hotness. But sales numbers bear out that hybrids are the answer, and what’s more, automakers like Rivian and Lucid losing absolute metric crap-tons of money on electric vehicles — and other car companies like Ford deciding it’s worth losing $20 billion to cut many of its electric vehicle programs altogether — goes to show that the market just isn’t there for fully electric cars.
Of course, there’s Tesla, a company that managed something amazing. Lightning in a bottle, you might call it. It was an American company that came out of nowhere, developed its own charging infrastructure, created electric cars that were generations better than anything up to that point, and offered the cars at a rather competitive price. They also had a larger-than-life CEO who was admired by most of the world at the time, and also, they made loads of money by selling ZEV credits to automakers running afoul of CO2 compliance. That credit system is likely gone in the United States, thanks to the new presidential administration.
I get the impression that many companies saw Tesla’s success as proof that a sustainable EV company can exist. But in my eyes, to try to replicate Tesla’s model is silly. Tesla is one-of-one. An outlier. I tweeted this thought over a year ago, suggesting that EV companies should hybridize ASAP:
My suggestions to EV-only automakers: 1. Be careful looking at Tesla and thinking “I want those sales numbers.” You are not Tesla. Don’t try to be Tesla. Tesla is an anomaly. And 2. Get on the range extender bandwagon as soon as possible. Transition back to BEV-only later. https://t.co/1b7H2jmfN0
— David Tracy (@davidntracy) October 25, 2024
You know who replied to that tweet? None other than Ford’s own Jim Farley, CEO:
Now it’s nearly 14 months later, and Ford announced that its departing fully-electric F-150 Lighting is being replaced by a range-extended F-150 Lightning.
Ford Will Add A Gas Engine To The F-150 Lightning To Create A 700-Mile EREV
Naturally, EV-diehards are not thrilled:
This is what happens when you make sh*t products. This has nothing to do with making EV’s; this has everything to do with making bad EV’s. https://t.co/f3kxBlR6Ul
— phil beisel (@pbeisel) December 16, 2025
Hybrids are not the answer Jim
The future is all-electric and autonomous
You should’ve taken Elon’s offer to license Tesla FSD years ago…
Not looking good for Ford https://t.co/vPdl8fBtc5
— Dalton Brewer (@daltonbrewer) December 16, 2025
This going EREV will almost certainly be better for the environment than the BEV.
100K people trading their 15 MPG F-150 for an EREV truck has more value than 25K people trading their Tesla for a BEV truck.
— David Tracy (@davidntracy) December 16, 2025
You can see my opinion on the matter in the reply above.
This seems like a smart move on Ford’s part. The truth is that fully-electric pickup trucks make little sense for the mass market, and if you don’t believe me, just listen to what the former CEO of Lucid (an electric car company that refuses to offer gasoline engines) told me when I interviewed him last year:
“But let me tell you the reality is, and it’s me saying this, that it is not possible today with today’s technology to make an affordable pickup truck with anything [other] than internal combustion.”
This is just reality, which is where major corporations have to live.
With Fully Electric Vehicles, America’s Love For Big Cars Gets Expensive
America loves large cars, and large cars typically have what’s called in the industry “a high Vehicle Demand Energy” (VDE). This is the energy needed to move the vehicles down the road, and though it can be affected by powertrain (because, for example, a gas engine requires more cooling, which can lead to more drag; an electric vehicle is heavier, which can lead to more rolling resistance, etc.), this is more about the vehicle in which the powertrain is placed than the powertrain itself.
America’s taste for large vehicles means we tend to drive cars that require lots of energy just to go down the road, and if that vehicle is, for example, a pickup truck (like a Chevy Silverado EV) or SUV (like a Rivian R1S), you’re going to need a massive battery to achieve the range that the average American wants. Both the Silverado EV and the Rivian R1S offer batteries over 140 kWh, with the former offering one over 200 kWh.
Add a big trailer to those vehicles, and even those giant batteries won’t be enough to overcome not only range issues, but recharging issues, as infrastructure still isn’t good enough, and pull-through chargers for trailer-pulling pickups just aren’t very common even in 2025. When it comes to towing, EVs are simply the wrong tool for the job, as I wrote last year.
With Lucid and Rivian losing billions of dollars annually as EV demand remains softer than expected (though we do have some early signs that Rivian is turning things around, with a few quarters of positive gross profits, though net profits remain elusive), there’s an obvious question worth asking: Should these companies build cars that appeal to more than just a small electric sliver of the American car market-pie?
Rivian thinks the upcoming R2 and R3x will be enough. I have no doubt that they’ll sell relatively well, but I do have doubt about whether they’ll bring Rivian to sustainable net profitability. After all, the world already has cool, small electric SUVs like the Hyundai Ioniq 5 and the Chevy Equinox EV. And sure, you could say the world has lots of great hybrids, but the sales figures are on a different level. With hybrids, there’s more than just a sliver of the American market “pie” to share.
EREVS Are A Compromise That Can Minimize The Most Important Compromise
America wants hybrids; when Scout offered its vehicles as fully-electric or range-extended hybrid models, the majority of pre-orders were for the hybrids. And for good reasons. Though some EV purists call hybrids “compromises,” in truth, every car is a compromise, and a hybrid’s main advantage is that it’s actually a compromise-minimizer. If you think about the compromises that actually matter in the car world, it’s not compromises to packaging or complexity or even vehicle performance — what matters, big picture, is minimizing compromises to the way a driver actually uses their vehicle, while keeping the biggest compromise — cost — down. And in this way, hybrids are less of a compromise than BEVs.
I live in California, where the infrastructure is better than pretty much anywhere stateside. Still, charging a BEV can be an inconvenience compared to filling up a gas car, and what’s more, it can actually cost as much or more. I’m not saying charging a car here is bad — if you leverage the right apps, and are smart about planning, you can really get a lot out of driving a BEV (and you can save money on driving) — but the compromise is nonzero. It’s not about charging infrastructure or charging times or poor towing range — more than anything, it’s about cost.
Americans want to drive big cars, and they want to be able to not have to worry about range anxiety. This RA term is one that lots of EV journalists have historically dismissed. “Nobody needs 300 miles of range. 100 is just fine!” many say. In fact, here’s a Facebook reply to our story on Ford ditching the BEV Lightning for an EREV:
The Lightning is an excellent vehicle that won’t sell because truck buyers think they’re going to tow a trailer 500 miles every weekend. They won’t, and the range of an Lightning would actually meet their needs 99% of the time, but people stupidly make buying decisions based on that remote possibility that they might need extra capability someday.
The Gas Generator Doesn’t Have To Be Great Or Expensive
Are EV Car Companies EV-First or Environment-First?
OK, So There Are Some Huge Branding Problems
One topic I cannot ignore is the branding of it all. If a company has built its identity on a powertrain, things get tricky if they want to offer a different one. Rivian is all-electric, anti-gas. Lucid is the same. Tesla is the same. Since their inception, they’ve been no-gas, all-electric companies, largely because none of these companies would exist otherwise. How, then, can you maintain brand integrity if you offer a gasoline range extender?
I mean, Ford’s $20B write down is just a numbers game of writing down the capital loss of their investment in that joint venture with SK and whatever they did with their Lightning factory. They’re just going to spread this out over several years to offset their tax exposure.
The idea that EV companies should invest massive amounts of money to hybridize their lineups is kind of silly. They won’t sell more vehicles because the who idea behind those vehicles is that they are electric. If Rivian started selling EREV vehicles, people wouldn’t buy them, and they would have had to invest heavily in entirely new manufacturing capabilities in order to do it.
David, I agree with you. My comments are US-focused, not globally due to the current (and hopefully) near-term noise in our country. From my many years in the OEM and service worlds, working in advance manufacturing, manufacturing, product planning, product strategy, service & parts, and as a technician, I see the EREVs as a necessary evolutionary technology to bridge us to the EV future.
Where I don’t fully agree is with your BEV-only brand loyalty concern. Yup, Tesla is a mass producer OEM, no question. Again, in my US-only comments, I don’t see the risk of critical levels of customer abandonment from the BEV-only companies if they were to offer EREVs in addition to maintaining their BEVs. Give the customers a choice. Like car enthusiasts at this site, or car enthusiasts in the real world, we’re a very small percentage of the total customer base.
This feels right, I suspect for every EV purist Tesla/Rivian/Lucid would lose by offering EREVs they would gain several EV skeptics who have real or imagined needs that the range extender satisfies
TLDR, That’s a lot of words behind a concept that’s yet to be proven for this vehicle type in North America, and doesn’t offer more electric daily driving mix than a good PHEV. This EREV idea will work as intended for $70,000-$100,000 super trucks, but forget about affordability.
If these range extended pickups come to fruition for something even approaching the ‘more affordable than electric’ pricing that this site bandies about, I’ll replace my 2.7 Ecoboost lariat with one when it ages out.
Sadly, we all know that isn’t how this is going to go.
Look, I’m all for grabbing the low hanging fruit when it comes to electrification vs the moonshot. Someone explain to me how this EREV tech actually saves money or fuel over a PHEV with an 80 mile range.
I agree with a lot of the comments here regarding the practicality of EREVs. I’m confident they have use cases in areas where BEV range is a limitation. But the bigger barrier to light duty electrification is affordability and infrastructure. $5 billion dollars in federal funding to fund charging stations is moving forward in all 50 states (and DC and Puerto Rico) and EV charging station installations are still being installed by the private sector while becoming more standardized and reliable. Now we just need affordable EVs. EREVs don’t do that and actively work against the infrastructure buildout.
The time for EREVs was 10 years ago, when battery technology was in its infancy and vehicles like the Volt and i3 were sold. Battery technology and infrastructure has come far enough that the increased cost and complexity of an EREV doesn’t make any sense for most people.
I would just get a hybrid over and EREV. Toyota and Honda have great and incredibly efficient hybrids that don’t rely on super large and expensive batteries. I think the market for EREVs is actually smaller than pure EV. If you have home level 2 charging, live in a populated area, and don’t tow things, an EV is a VERY low compromise vehicle (I’ve got one and love it).
Honda’s hybrid system is actually a pretty interesting mix between hybrid and EREV. It doesn’t have a traditional transmission, the gas engine runs a generator that powers an electric motor for low to mid speed driving with a clutch that can connect the gas engine directly to the wheels for high speed, kind of seems like the best of both worlds. idk why they don’t offer plug in versions, since the electric motor is already sized to fully power the car all they’d have to do is upsize the battery.
Yeah, I think it’s a great system! I’m an engineer, so I generally gravitate to simpler solutions.
I’d be interested to see if the EREV pickups will be able to tow up grades with only the on-board generator running (since it’s not connected to the wheels).
Ram has claimed the RamCharger will be able to do this (start at the bottom of Davis Dam with battery depleted and max tow weight behind).
I will anxiously await TFL Truck putting this claim to the test though.
China is already eating our electric vehicle lunch. Range extenders aren’t the answer. Consumers can be moved by policy and incentives, and the government should be facilitating the transition instead of trying to stop it.
Next up from the Trump EPA: mandatory leaded gasoline.
I have never been an EV evangelist, but choice matters. If OEMs want to continue making EV only options, go for it! If OEMs want to stick with hybrids, awesome! If OEMs want to make ICE-only cars (especially for fun, with manuals), more power to them. What I am saying is that the buying public should choose what’s best for their use case and likes. I truly believe that competition from all means of car production makes for a better automotive landscape (or sometimes worse (thanks, Tesla for all of the dang Ipad-screens in most new cars)).
I really appreciate that you mention how buyers are often non-rational and buy for what they want to do instead of what they actually do. That’s the beauty of cars; they are an extension of our personalities and are somewhat aspirational for the people we want to be!
I will also say that the politization of EVs has been a real bummer, but the concerns are real. To many enthusiasts, an “All EV future” sounds horrible. I, for one, would hate to see automotive enthusiasm kept for only the richest of people. I can imagine that, as time goes on, fewer and fewer gas stations will be available for fill ups, oil will skyrocket, and driving my classic cars will be completely unaffordable. I almost equate it to the horse; once super common, now only the wealthy really get to enjoy them. Maybe my fears are unfounded, maybe they aren’t. Folks like me do not love change.
I don’t read this as EV bashing whatsoever. This is a very thoughtful, nuanced, well reasoned opinion from someone who knows cars, inside out, top to bottom.