Ford raises initial pricing of F-150 Lightning EV Pro, Tesla solar roofing falls below estimates

Yahoo Finance automotive correspondent Pras Subramanian joins Yahoo Finance Live to discuss the latest news from Ford and Tesla.

Video transcript

SEANA SMITH: Let's move onto Ford. It was another trender here today. Ford raising the price of the F-150 Lightning Pro for the fourth time in the last year. Pras Subramanian here with the details. Pras, shares up, what, about 2% today. So at least the Street a bit encouraged by this maybe, help with some of the costs?

PRAS SUBRAMANIAN: Yeah, I guess the Street isn't concerned about sticker shock here for people who want to get this F-150 Lightning. But yeah, you mentioned four price hikes here. So today they opened up the order books for the new-- for the next batch of reservation holders, and then with that new pricing so that Ford Pro base model went up $4,000 to $61,900 and ish dollars there.

It originally started at $42,000, right? So that's $20,000 in price hikes over the last year. It went from $42 to $48.9 to $53.7 to now $61.9. So really sort of hiking that base level up a lot. The cheaper-- or, I'm sorry, the more expensive Lariat and premium-- or Platinum trims went up a couple of grand here and there. But it's really this base model that went up significantly because you got to say, this is--

The cheap model supposed to be a loss leader. And they just can't keep up with the losses, it seems.

DAVE BRIGGS: Wow, OK. Tesla, obviously the leader in this space. What can you tell us about Tesla's solar roof systems?

PRAS SUBRAMANIAN: The solar applications, the solar products have been sort of a mystery for Tesla. They bought SolarCity with a lot of fanfare many years ago. And everyone thought they would be ramping up their installations. And new research from the group MacKenzie talks about how, back in 2019, Tesla said they wanted to install 1,000 roofs a week. They've only installed 22 roofs a week last year. So it's a significant--

DAVE BRIGGS: 22 total or 22 per week?

PRAS SUBRAMANIAN: 22 per week compared to goals of 1,000 per week.

SEANA SMITH: Yeah.

PRAS SUBRAMANIAN: So what's going on here?

SEANA SMITH: Exactly, so how would they in the world ever ramp up some of those installs to reach that type of goal? I mean, how many years out could we potentially be?

PRAS SUBRAMANIAN: I think the bigger question is that maybe they don't want to. The question is what does Tesla want to do with their solar business? We thought we'd hear more about that at the investor day. And they didn't say anything about it, other than the fact that solar is a cheap way to collect green energy.

So the questions are, do they have a new product coming out? Are they going to roll out a new product, and maybe that's why they're pulling back on some of these installations? They've canceled installations. They've refunded people's money. So the question is, what's happening?

And we have no clarity as to what they're doing with the solar business. And right now, 22 a week is nothing, really.

SEANA SMITH: Yeah, certainly. All right, look at Tesla's stock, not moving much today, obviously, because maybe there's-- we're just waiting for some news on what exactly the plans are with that. Pras, thanks so much.