You can look at Ford Motor Company’s 2025 financial report in two ways. 

On one hand, the automaker earned $6.8 billion before interest, taxes, and one-time costs. On the other hand, when you subtract those figures, it shows a net loss of more than $8 billion, the largest shortfall in almost 20 years.

Ford CEO Jim Farley focused on the positives in his report to shareholders.

“Ford delivered a strong 2025 in a dynamic and often volatile environment,” Farley said.

Tariffs added to that volatility. Ford says it paid $2 billion in import taxes in 2025. 

EV losses jolt the bottom line

Automotive analyst Paul Eisenstein with Headlight.News says electric vehicles proved very costly.

“Ford wrote off almost $20 billion on its electric vehicle operations,” he says. “That reflects a whole bunch of changes to their EV program.”

Ford ended production of the F-150 Lightning electric pickup truck. It also backed away from plans to convert a factory in Memphis, Tenn. into an EV-only facility.

Eisenstein says Ford has yet to make a profit on EVs but is not abandoning them. He says the company will launch its Universal EV concept at a factory in Louisville, Ky. 

“It’s a radical change in the way you design and build vehicles,” he says. “And if it works, it could lower the cost of EVs substantially.”

Quality is Job 1…or is it?

Farley’s biggest challenge may be improving quality. Ford issued 153 vehicle recalls in 2025, a new industry record. Eisenstein says Ford owners are tired of having multiple recalls on the same vehicle, and often for the same problem.

“This is costing the company billions of dollars and ticking off a lot of customers,” he says.

The blue oval has a silver lining

Ford’s annual earnings statement offered some hope. The company reported record revenue of $187 billion. U.S. sales rose 6% over 2024. And hourly workers will receive individual profit-sharing checks worth about $6800 based on pre-tax earnings.

Eisenstein says net profits or losses can be deceiving.

“The net can be affected by those one-time charges, which can be manipulated to give you a good or bad number, depending on what you feel like you need,” he says. “You want to have a clear sense of what the individual elements in the bottom line are all about.”

How is the Trump administration doing overall at managing the economy? 

There are bright spots: inflation is down, unemployment is low, and the stock market is strong. But there are also concerns: Prices are still high in many areas, there’s been a hiring freeze across a number of industries, and most of the investments energy is are concentrated in artificial intelligence — not spread across a diverse range of sectors. 

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is traditionally pro-free market, pro-business, and conservative leaning — and that’s also true for their partner organizations around the country.

Faye Nemer is the CEO of the Middle East North Africa American Chamber of Commerce, which operates out of Dearborn. She told producer Sam Corey that she generally likes how the Trump administration is managing the economy. She thinks the tariffs are strategic. And while Nemer realizes small businesses are hurting, she thinks that’s likely to change as national policies will trickle down to everyone else.

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Michigan’s economy is in flux.

Tariffs have pushed up the cost of some goods. Unemployment has ticked up slightly. Hiring practices are shifting as artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT become more prevalent in workplaces.

Those changes raise big questions for the state’s more than 900,000 small businesses — and the workers who depend on them. How are owners adapting to rising costs and new technologies? What does this moment feel like on the ground? And what should people be doing now to stay resilient?

To explore those questions, Mark Lee, founder of The Lee Group, sat down with The Metro’s Robyn Vincent. Lee hosts several talk shows and writes about business and the economy for Crain’s Detroit, with a focus on how national trends play out locally.

Listen to The Metro weekdays from 10 a.m. to noon ET on 101.9 FM and streaming on demand.

Subscribe to The Metro on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, NPR.org or wherever you get your podcasts.

More stories from The Metro