Ford Upgrades EV Explorer, Vows to Keep Stick Shifts: Ford Stock (NYSE:F) Slips

Legacy automaker Ford F -0.33% ▼ offered up quite a bit for us to consider today, as it not only showed off its new Ford Explorer EV, but also made a promise to drivers that the stick shift they knew and loved would not be going away, at least, not any time soon. The news was not quite what investors had hoped for, as Ford shares slipped fractionally in Thursday afternoon’s trading.

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The new 2026 Explorer EV—which is a European model—comes with a set of upgrades that will actually make it better than it has been in quite some time, reports suggest. Perhaps the biggest of these upgrades is a lithium iron phosphate (LFP) battery, which in turn powers a new kind of electric motor. These two working in tandem produce not only faster acceleration, but also better range on a full charge.

It gets better from there. The Intelligent Adaptive Cruise Control can now adjust speed itself by making note of its own environment. Junctions, roundabouts, and curves approaching are all signs for the cruise control to slow itself down, and then resume when the conditions change. Traffic Light Recognition allows for the car to respond to lights, and Reversing Assist will actually automate the controls for 50-meter bursts.

Stick Here to Stay

Meanwhile, with cars increasingly driving themselves, it would be easy to wonder if the manual transmission would end up phased out. Not so, says Jim Farley, Ford’s CEO, who made it clear that the manual transmission would stick around, at least in some cars.

Farley did make it clear that the manual transmission would be mostly for the Mustang lineup, both coupe and convertible. But the Mustang would always keep the manual transmission, as Farley said about as definitively as possible: “Out of our cold, dead hands will we not have a manual Mustang.”

Is Ford Stock a Good Buy Right Now?

Turning to Wall Street, analysts have a Hold consensus rating on F stock based on three Buys, 12 Holds and one Sell assigned in the past three months, as indicated by the graphic below. After a 27.07% rally in its share price over the past year, the average F price target of $14.02 per share implies 16.06% upside potential.

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