Ford is still losing roughly $33,000 on every EV it builds

Ford’s own second-quarter 2026 results put a hard number on it: the Model e electric-vehicle division posted a $919 million operating loss on just 28,000 vehicles sold, an EBIT margin of negative 89.6%. Divide it out and Ford lost roughly $32,800 on every single EV it delivered that quarter — more than the sticker price of the cheapest EVs it sells. Ford still expects a roughly $4.0 billion loss for the full year, though that’s actually an improvement from prior guidance of $4.0 to $4.5 billion, and the company points to this as its third consecutive quarter of year-over-year EBIT improvement. Losing less money is still losing a lot of money.

GM won’t publish a per-unit number, but its own writedowns tell the story

General Motors doesn’t break out a clean EV loss-per-vehicle figure in its earnings releases, but its own disclosed charges do the talking. On its Q2 2026 earnings call, GM detailed $2.3 billion in incremental EV restructuring charges, bringing cumulative EV-related charges since mid-2025 to $10.9 billion — on top of the roughly $7.1 billion charge it had already flagged for its EV capacity pullback and North American realignment. GM’s own release attributes the newest charge to “strategic realignment of our EV capacity and manufacturing footprint,” and the company separately expects EV wholesale volumes to be only “slightly up” in the back half of 2026 amid a smaller overall EV market. A company doesn’t write off nearly $11 billion against a business that’s making money.

Lucid is losing over $100,000 per car, though half of that is a one-time charge

Lucid’s own second-quarter 2026 filing with the SEC shows revenue of $405 million against a cost of revenue of $832 million — a gross loss of roughly $427 million on 3,953 vehicles delivered, or about $108,000 lost per car. Nearly $300 million of that came from a single inventory and purchase-commitment write-down tied to Lucid’s demand reset, so strip that out and the underlying loss still runs around $32,000 per vehicle — in the same range as Ford’s. Lucid has publicly described its own situation in stark terms, saying it “continues to consume a significant amount of cash each quarter” and deliberately cut production to preserve capital rather than chase volume.

Rivian has cut its per-vehicle loss by roughly 90% in a year

Rivian is the clearest evidence that these losses aren’t fixed in stone. Its automotive segment posted a gross loss of just $36 million on 12,194 vehicles delivered in Q2 2026 — about $2,950 lost per vehicle, down from a $335 million automotive loss on 10,661 deliveries, or roughly $31,400 per vehicle, in the same quarter of 2025. That’s a per-unit improvement of more than 90% in a single year, driven by the ramp of the cheaper R2 model, even though Rivian says roughly $100 million of extra cost in the quarter came specifically from getting that new line up to speed. Rivian’s overall gross margin actually turned positive, at 11%, but only because its software and services business ran a 42% margin — the car-building side of the company, on its own, is still in the red.

Tesla is still profitable, but its cushion is shrinking fast

Tesla remains the automaker that solved this problem years ago, and it’s still not losing money per car. But its own Q2 2026 results show just how much thinner that margin has gotten: operating margin fell to just 1.4% for the quarter, a sharp compression that followed the expiration of the federal EV tax credit and aggressive price cuts to keep volume up. Being the one automaker that’s actually profitable on EVs doesn’t mean being immune to the same cost and demand pressure squeezing everyone else — it just means starting from a much better position.

The gap isn’t closing evenly

Line these disclosures up and the EV business splits into three groups, all coming from the automakers’ own numbers rather than anyone’s guesswork. Ford and Lucid are still absorbing losses in the same rough neighborhood, tens of thousands of dollars per vehicle, with only modest year-over-year improvement. GM won’t say what it’s losing per unit but is spending billions to shrink its EV footprint rather than grow it. Rivian is the outlier, closing its per-vehicle gap by an order of magnitude in twelve months. And Tesla, the industry’s proof of concept that EVs can be profitable, is now watching its own margin get squeezed by the same forces working against everyone else. There’s no single “EV economics,” just five different balance sheets moving in five different directions at once.