Ford Motor Co. is putting gasoline and hybrid F-150 and F-Series Super Duty trucks at the top of its production line as it seeks to recover from losses related to a fire at a key aluminum supplier’s plant.
The company’s all-electric vehicle, the F-150 Lightning, is not on the list.
Ford announced Thursday that assembly of the F-150 Lightning truck at its Rouge Electric Vehicle Center in Dearborn, Michigan, remains suspended. That’s because gasoline and hybrid F-Series trucks are more profitable for Ford and use less aluminum, according to Ford.
Ford is touting sales growth for its all-electric F-150 Lightning truck, but those numbers still dwarf the company’s F-Series gasoline-powered trucks.
Ford sold 15,005 F-150 Lightning pickups in the third quarter, an increase of 39.7% from the same period last year. To put this into context, Ford delivered 545,522 vehicles in the third quarter, of which 207,732 were F-Series. Ford has sold 23,034 F-150 Lightning trucks so far in 2025, an increase of about 1% over the first nine months of 2024, according to recent sales data.
A Ford spokesperson said the F-150 is the best-selling electric pickup truck in the U.S., but the company is focusing on producing gasoline and hybrid trucks as it recovers from a Sept. 16 fire at aluminum supplier Novelis plant in Oswego, New York, that severely damaged Hot Mill. Novelis said it plans to restart the hot plant by December 2025.
“We have a sufficient inventory of F-150 Lightnings and plan to reopen the Rouge Electric Vehicle Center (REVC) at the appropriate time, but we do not have an exact date at this time,” spokesman Ian Thibodeau said.
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The Novelis plant fire cost Ford dearly and disrupted production of some of its most popular and profitable vehicles. The fire will cost Ford up to $2 billion in fourth-quarter profits, the automaker announced Thursday in its third-quarter results. Those costs, combined with up to $1 billion in headwinds from tariffs, led Ford to cut its full-year profit forecast for 2025 from $6.5 billion to $6 billion.
Ford’s solution to recovering losses from the fire is to increase F-Series production by more than 50,000 units in 2026 by adding a third shift. The project is expected to create up to 1,000 new jobs, with all hourly employees at the Rouge Electric Vehicle Center moving to third-shift work at the adjacent Dearborn Truck Plant.
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