Ford's second Model T moment costs $28,350

Good morning. Ford has now compared two different trucks to the Model T. The first one was cancelled in December after roughly 100,000 sales against a plan for 150,000 a year. The second one costs $28,350, ships late next year, and doesn't have a photo yet.

That gap, between what a price promises and what it survives, runs through the whole issue: the last gasoline NSX crosses the block this afternoon with a reserve to clear, BMW is swapping carbon fiber for flax on the roof of the next M3 and claiming it costs no more, and Ford's EV division is losing about $32,800 a car while it waits for the cheap truck to arrive.

In today's newsletter, we'll get into:

Let’s roll.

A 2022 Acura NSX Type S, #137 of 350 built, is live on Cars & Bids with the hammer falling at 1:30 PM Eastern today. One owner, roughly 3,400 miles, unmodified, clean history, Curva Red over Ebony, with the Carbon Fiber Interior Sport and ELS Studio packages, carbon-ceramic brakes, and the carbon rear spoiler. Build sheet and delivery memorabilia included.

The Type S was Acura's send-off for the second-generation NSX: the 3.5-liter twin-turbo V6 and three-motor hybrid system bumped to 600 hp and 492 lb-ft, with a quicker-shifting nine-speed dual-clutch and torque-vectoring Super Handling AWD. Three hundred fifty cars worldwide, about 300 of them for the US, stickered at $169,500 base or $182,500 with the Lightweight Package. Acura has said the next NSX will be electric, which makes this the last one that will ever make a noise.

On August 6, Ford gave its first Universal EV Platform vehicle a name, the Fathom, and a price: $28,350, or $29,945 with the $1,595 destination charge. That lands exactly on the $30,000 target the company has been promising for a year. Preorders open early 2027, deliveries later that year, production at Louisville Assembly in Kentucky, where equipment installation is in its final stages.

What we know: midsize, five seats, projected passenger volume greater than a Toyota RAV4, frunk plus bed, bidirectional power, digital key, a large touchscreen running native Apple Maps with CarPlay and Android Auto on top. Every truck carries BlueCruise hardware; the base models will almost certainly need a subscription to switch it on. Ford is putting roughly $5 billion into Louisville and BlueOval Battery Park to build it.

What we don't know: what it looks like, or how far it goes. No photo, no range figure. US News notes it may not ship until fall 2027 as a 2028 model, which is a long time for a price to hold.

Now the part that makes this a story rather than a press release. Jim Farley has called the UEV platform Ford's "Model T moment," pointing out that $30,000 is roughly a Model T's sticker adjusted for inflation. Ford said something very similar about the F-150 Lightning in 2021. Here is how that went:

Why it matters to you:

BMW has confirmed that flax-fiber composites, developed with Swiss firm Bcomp, are cleared for series production, with the roof of the next-generation M3 as the first named application. The BMW M Concept Neue Klasse shown at Le Mans in June wore the material on the roof, splitter, hood vent, side skirts, mirror caps, diffuser, and seat backs. In January the program won the JEC Composites Innovation Award for automotive parts.

So: how does a plant stem compete with carbon?

On raw fiber, it doesn't. Standard carbon fiber has a tensile modulus around 230 GPa. Flax sits roughly in the 50 to 70 GPa range. Flax is lighter, about 1.4 to 1.5 g/cm³ against carbon's 1.75 to 1.8, but that doesn't close a three-to-four-times stiffness gap. If you laid up a flat flax panel to match a carbon panel's stiffness, it would be thicker and heavier.

On thin panels, geometry rescues it. The bending stiffness of a shell scales with the cube of its thickness. A ribbed flax skin can match a thin monolithic carbon skin for stiffness and weight, which is why the roof, hood, doors, splitter, and wing on the M4 GT4 EVO are all flax and only the roof stayed carbon on the race car. The exception is anything that needs absolute strength, like a tub or crash structure: a 2020 crash-test program found flax needed to be about 40 percent heavier to match carbon there.

On the property nobody advertises, flax wins outright. Damping. Carbon panels ring; flax panels don't. McLaren's flax racing seat exists because drivers were taking a beating through the seat over kerbs. On a road car, a roof that doesn't drum at 80 mph is a real benefit BMW hasn't led with. Flax also fails by tearing rather than shattering, no splinters and no carbon dust, which matters to anyone who has seen a carbon splitter meet a curb.

Here's the beat I'd add from my own workshop: I've spent enough time with carbon parts to know the thing you hear first is the thing you never read about in the spec sheet. Carbon roofs on M cars are gorgeous and they're also loud. If BMW's flax roof is quieter, buyers will notice before they notice the weave.

On cost and carbon: BMW's figure is about 40 percent lower CO₂e in production for the roof versus CFRP, plus end-of-life credit. On price, flax fabric is cheaper per kilogram than carbon, but part cost is mostly tooling, resin, and cycle time, and the roof runs through the same automated resin transfer molding as the carbon one. Read the cost claim as "not more expensive," not "cheap." The open question is aging: flax is a plant, and plants absorb moisture and dislike UV. BMW says the weave passed full homologation ageing tests, and the M4 GT4 has run it since 2022.

Ford's Q2 headline was a $1.3 billion net loss. Strip out $4.2 billion in one-time charges, mostly unwinding the BlueOval SK battery joint venture, and the core company made $2.5 billion in adjusted operating income, up 19 percent, and raised full-year guidance to $10 to $11 billion. Trucks and hybrids are commanding pricing power. That part of the business is fine.

Model e, the EV unit, is where the numbers get strange.

The division lost $919 million in the quarter, a $410 million improvement over last year. It achieved that by selling far fewer cars. Wholesales fell 53 percent to about 28,000 units, revenue fell 56 percent to $1.0 billion, and the loss per vehicle wholesaled rose from roughly $22,000 to about $32,800. Ford's US EV retail sales fell 57 percent in the first half to 16,606, fewer than the Mach-E sold on its own a year earlier. The quarter looks better because the bleeding is smaller in total and worse per unit.

Full-year guidance: Model e loses about $4.0 billion in 2026, including about $1 billion of investment in the UEV platform and Ford Energy, most of it weighted to the second half. That follows a $4.8 billion loss in 2025. Break-even is promised for 2029. Since the start of 2025, Ford has booked close to $20 billion in pre-tax charges for the EV retreat, with up to $2 billion more coming as the Lightning and three cancelled programs wind down.

Put the two stories together. Ford's first generation of EVs is being shrunk to stop the losses. Its second generation is one truck, at one price, from one plant, arriving late next year. Every dollar the Fathom misses its sticker by comes straight out of a division that already loses $32,800 a car.

Quick hits:

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