Breana Noble | (TNS) The Detroit News
In an effort to boost sales, Ford Motor Co. will cover the cost of a home charging station and its installation starting Tuesday through the end of the year for customers who buy or lease a new electric vehicle.
EV sales aren’t growing as quickly as the industry had expected. Affordability, availability of charging infrastructure, battery health and convenience remain barriers to EV adoption. Covering the expense of getting a Level 2 charger for customers of Mustang Mach-E SUVs or F-150 Lightning trucks to refuel at home helps to address some of those obstacles, said Martin Delonis, senior manager of strategy for Model e, Ford’s EV division.
“An electric vehicle fills up when you’re not paying attention — passive fueling overnight like charging a smartphone,” he said during a virtual briefing on the program. “It’s hard for anyone to understand a convenience that didn’t exist before. Only half the people we talked to recognize that it was easier to fill up at home and wake up ready to go every day. There’s an efficiency there that’s not realized, and it takes time to understand it.”
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Ford didn’t provide an exact number for the total value of the “Ford Power Promise” fourth-quarter promotion. The charger included is the Ford Charge Station Pro, which retails for $1,310. Installation can cost several hundred dollars more.
Customers who already have a charger or are unable to install a charger if, for example, they live in an apartment can receive a discount of up to $2,000 on a new EV over the course of the promotion. Ford Pro fleet customers who purchase the all-electric E-Transit commercial van or another EV will receive a commercial charging cash incentive, Ford CEO Jim Farley wrote in a LinkedIn post.
“Filling up at home with electricity can be a significant cost save for many owners compared to filling up with gas. Problem is nearly half of them don’t know how home charging works,” he wrote. “Our industry seems to want to answer these questions in a time-honored way — cash on the hood. Cheap lease deals on electric vehicles are popping up everywhere. Ford believes it will take more than jumbo rebates to truly break through with the estimated 19 million people in the U.S. interested in electric vehicles. It will take — you guessed it — convenience, peace of mind and expert service. It will take a modern-day version of the friendly filling station, only this time you ‘fill ’er up’ at home.”
Ford customers who already have purchased an EV before Tuesday are ineligible for the promotion, unless they buy another.
Ford is working with its charging installation partner, Qmerit. The program covers standard installation, which supports up to an 60 amp circuit and 80 feet of wire run. The charger doesn’t use a NEMA 14-50 outlet. If a customer’s home requires a panel upgrade, the customer would be responsible for covering the difference for that.
The Ford Charge Station Pro can add up to 30 miles of range per hour for the extended-range F-150 Lightning truck, according to Ford’s website. Customers can schedule a charge in the FordPass app. The charger also offers bidirectional charging so that if a customer’s electricity goes out at home, the EV’s battery can send stored energy to power it.
U.S. EV sales for Ford, which sells the second-most electric models in the country behind Tesla Inc., were up 58% year-over-year through August. Ford will report third-quarter sales on Wednesday.
Chevrolet has offered promotions to cover home charging installation on the purchase or lease of a new 2022 or 2023 Bolt EV or Bolt EUV.
The Ford Power Promise also seeks to educate customers on other benefits of buying a Ford EV, said Becca Anderson, senior director for Ford Model e customer success. The Blue Oval Charging Network has more than 75,000 EV chargers; the automaker is shipping adapters that customers can use to charge with Tesla’s Supercharger network, and Ford offers an eight-year, 100,000-mile warranty on its EVs’ batteries. Additionally, it has a 24/7 EV support line accessible by text or phone.
“Shoppers worry about, range, charging, battery health,” Delonis said. “These are concerns of owners. This tells us that there’s a tremendous perception gap to bridge, and shoppers need help crossing it to make an electric vehicle a real option for fence-sitters. We need to close the gap between perception and reality.”
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