Ford's Q2 2026 earnings looked good on the surface: adjusted EPS of $0.42 beat the $0.35 estimate, and the company raised its full-year adjusted EBIT guidance to $10–11 billion (from $8.5–10.5 billion) and its free cash flow guidance to $6–7 billion (from $5–6 billion). The stock rose after hours. But the page in Ford's earnings deck covering its Model e electric vehicle division tells a very different story than the headline numbers do.
-$919M
Model e EBIT loss, Q2 2026
-58%
Model e revenue, year over year
$4.2B
Special charges to unwind battery JV and cut EV programs
Ford's Model e segment results from its Q2 2026 earnings presentation. (Source: Ford Motor Company)
Two Numbers That Are Actually One Number
Model e lost $919 million in the quarter, an improvement of $410 million from a year earlier. Read on its own, that sounds like real progress. But Model e's revenue was only about $1 billion in the quarter — down 58% year over year from $2.4 billion in Q2 2025. Those two facts aren't separate: Ford's EV losses shrank largely because Ford sold far fewer EVs, not because the underlying business got healthier.
Ford said as much directly, attributing the drop to "right-sizing of Mach-E production to customer demand and discontinuation of F-150 Lightning." The resulting EBIT margin for Model e was -89.6% — for every dollar of EV revenue Ford brought in last quarter, it lost about ninety cents.
| Quarter | Model e Revenue | Wholesale Units (000) | EBIT | EBIT Margin |
| Q2 2025 | $2.4B | 60 | -$1.3B | -56.4% |
| Q3 2025 | $1.8B | 50 | -$1.4B | -79.1% |
| Q4 2025 | $1.3B | 37 | -$1.2B | -94.6% |
| Q1 2026 | $1.2B | 34 | -$0.8B | -63.1% |
| Q2 2026 | $1.0B | 28 | -$0.9B | -89.6% |
Both revenue and wholesale unit volume have fallen in every single quarter on this chart. Losing less money by building and selling less product is a defensible management decision, arguably even the correct one given demand — but it's a contraction, not a turnaround.
The $4.2 Billion Charge Nobody Highlighted
Beyond the quarterly numbers, Ford also booked $4.2 billion in special charges tied to its EV strategy, split into two pieces.
Where the $4.2 billion came from
- $3.6 billion, largely non-cash, from unwinding BlueOval SK — Ford's battery manufacturing joint venture with SK On
- Roughly $500 million from EV program cancellations that Ford announced back in December 2025
Unwinding a battery joint venture isn't just a rough-quarter write-down — it's dismantling industrial capacity Ford built for a specific strategy. Ford committed to domestic battery cell manufacturing at scale, and this charge reflects not needing that capacity on the timeline it originally planned. Put together with the discontinued Lightning, the cut Mach-E production, and the canceled programs, the picture is a company actively taking apart its first-generation EV strategy rather than just having a slow quarter.