By David Shepardson
(Reuters) – Ford Motor said on Friday it will temporarily cut one of three shifts at the Michigan plant that builds its electric F-150 lightning pickup truck, citing multiple constraints, including supply chain issues.
The No. 2 U.S. automaker said the cuts are unrelated to the United Auto Workers strike. Ford said the move takes effect Monday and would affect about 700 jobs. It said it will rotate the shift that is being cut, and did not say how long the production cut would last.
Ford said it was “working through processing and delivering vehicles held for quality checks after restarting production in August.”
The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday that a UAW official said in a memo that Ford was considering canceling a shift citing slowing demand and indicated that the company was looking to build more gasoline-powered trucks instead. “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that our sales for the Lightning have tanked,” the memo said, according to the newspaper.
Ford declined to comment on the memo.
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The automaker said last week F-150 EV U.S. sales fell 46% in three months ending Sept. 30 to 3,503 but are still up 40% over 2022 for the first nine months. F-150 EVs account for about 2% of all Ford F-series sales.
(Reporting by David Shepardson in Washington Shivansh Tiwary in Bengaluru; Editing by Maju Samuel and David Gregorio)