Legacy automaker Ford (F) lost over 1.5% in Friday afternoon’s trading after two new facts came to light: one, its green plans aren’t completely dead yet, and two, its Transit Connect inventory in the United States has run dry. The combination of factors did little to help its share price.
Back in March 2023, Ford officially pulled the plug on the Transit Connect, a line of small vans, in the North American market. Once 2023 ran out, it declared that no more would be produced therein. And now, reports note, we have officially come to the end of that line as all the backlog has apparently disappeared from said market. With sales in open decline in the U.S., there was no next-generation version of the Transit Connect put together.
Those interested in getting one of these, meanwhile, will have to turn their gazes to Europe, where a new version with a total redesign has emerged.
Charging While Driving
And while we know that Ford has pared back its greener aspirations, those aspirates are not entirely dead. In fact, a newly revealed patent application shows that Ford has been working on overcoming one of the biggest problems of all: vehicle charging.
The patent in question, filed back in August, details a system that turns roads into chargers, using an electric vehicle’s wireless inductive charging coils to connect to ones that have been added to a road surface to work as, effectively, a constant charging surface that feeds power back into a vehicle while it drives. There are some issues with this plan—one of the biggest is the efficiency of power transfer—so Ford’s patent hopes to address those issues.
Is Ford a Good Stock to Buy Now?
Turning to Wall Street, analysts have a Moderate Buy consensus rating on F stock based on five Buys, eight Holds, and one Sell assigned in the past three months, as indicated by the graphic below. After a 5.33% loss in its share price over the past year, the average F price target of $14 per share implies 32.51% upside potential.
