Ford’s Escape Has Always Outsold Its Entire EV Portfolio Combined, So Ford Canceled It To Build an EV

Ford is undergoing a transformation. We get it. EV trucks have proven to be an abject failure in the United States. EVs overall are tanking in North America. Subsidies are over for the foreseeable future, and may never return. So, Ford has decided to kill its gas-powered compact crossover. Wait, what?

Compact five-passenger crossovers make up the largest segment of the auto industry. Every brand has a great one, many have two or three. Ford had the US-built Escape line, which included EVs and plug-in hybrids, and its Bronco Sport line, which is imported from Mexico. The Escape is outselling the Bronco Sport, which every media member and analyst considers a smash hit for Ford. So Ford killed off the US-built, stronger-selling crossover. If we are not being clear, this defies all logic.

The Escape had regular, easy-peasy deliveries of around 12,000 units per month. We understand that you don’t follow vehicle deliveries like we do, so here are some numbers to consider. These are Monthly deliveries:
Ford Mustang = 3,700 per month
Ford Ranger = 5,900 per month
Ford Expedition = 6,100 per month
The entire brand of Lincoln vehicles combined = 8,600 per month
Ford Escape = 12,000 per month.

As you can see, the Escape is one of Ford’s top-selling automobiles. It outsells all of Lincoln by 50%. And Escape was the model Ford decided should go.

After telling the world that the Lightning was all that a bag of chips for about five years, it’s canceled. Hard to argue with the killing of a vehicle that barely sells, right? Ford was only selling about a thousand of them each month at the end. Total deliveries in 2025 through November were under 26,000 units, and the Lightning is down significantly compared to last year, when subsidies were being piled on, and the vocal minority of EV fans were solidly in charge of government. Killing the F-150 Lightning is easy to understand. Nice try, $19.5 billion wasted, start over. 

Now, let’s add up all of Ford’s EVs in total for 2025 and compare it to the Escape. Mustang Mach-E, plus E-Transit, plus Lighting = 52,973 units through November. The Escape beats the entire EV portfolio at Ford with 132,471 units delivered through November. And that number is on pace with 2024. Escape was not dropping. It was a solid, reliable, easy 12K units per month. 

The last Ford Escape has now been built, and it will move into storage with a few tens of thousands of other Escapes that Ford pre-built so that its dealer owners would not fall over dead of a coronary. This gives them something to sell for a while against the RAV4 and CR-V, which are two of the top five best-selling vehicles on wheels in America.

I’m secretly hoping this is all a mistake. Ford plans to open an Escape factory in Upper Scobobbia in Q1 and import them under a no-tariff agreement of some sort. Or the plant is really not going to produce a new EV, but a new Escape, and it’s a big fake-out. I can’t come up with other scenarios where Ford doesn’t wipe hundreds of thousands of easy-to-sell American-built products from its portfolio.

I’ve laid out the facts and figures. Now tell me I’m crazy, wrong, dumb. I want to be wrong about this badly. Please paste a comment that will shed some light on this. 
 

John Goreham is the Vice President of the New England Motor Press Association and an expert vehicle tester. John completed an engineering program with a focus on electric vehicles, followed by two decades of work in high-tech, biopharma, and the automotive supply chain before becoming a news contributor. He is a member of the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE int). In addition to his fourteen years of work at Torque News, John has published thousands of articles and reviews at American news outlets. He is known for offering unfiltered opinions on vehicle topics. You can connect with John on LinkedIn and follow his work on his personal X channel or on our X channel. John employs grammar and punctuation software when proofreading, and he sometimes uses image generation tools.