This isn’t just a Ford story – it’s the moment the electric car narrative collided head-on with reality.

There are big numbers in the car industry, and then there are numbers that make even hardened executives pause, breathe in sharply, and reach for the nearest spreadsheet. Nineteen point five billion dollars is firmly in the latter category. That is the amount Ford has just written off as it dramatically pulls back from large parts of its electric vehicle strategy, cancelling programmes, binning future models, tearing up battery partnerships and, perhaps most tellingly of all, quietly conceding that the way we were promised the electric future would unfold was always far more fragile than many wanted to admit.