Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson/Ars Technica)

Until a long-promised future replete with driverless cars arrives, we're stuck behind the wheels of our own vehicles. Autonomous driving is slowly getting more… autonomous in places, but for passenger cars that still feature steering wheels, we still need to keep our hands on the wheel and eyes on the road—if you're not driving a GM with SuperCruise or a Ford with BlueCruise, that is.

Currently available only in certain trims of Ford's first two battery electric vehicles, the Mustang Mach-E and F-150 Lightning , BlueCruise enables hands-free driving on over 130,000 miles of divided highways around the US. It's essentially Ford's Co-Pilot 360 driver-assistance system paired with a set of cameras inside the car that monitor the driver's eyes to make sure they're looking at the road.

I recently got to spend a week each with the Ford Mustang Mach-E GT and F-150 Lightning Platinum, both of which are equipped with BlueCruise. Those two weeks also coincided with a positive COVID test for my son, a freshman at the University of Iowa. As that university's COVID policy for positive tests boils down to "you don't have to go home, but you can't stay here," and I had my own (mild) bout about a month prior, I was dispatched to retrieve the boy so he could isolate at home.

Enlarge / Ford's electric F-150 Lighting (L), eTransit (M), and Mustang Mach-E (R) battery-electric vehicles have all been such successes that they're all sold out for the rest of the year. (credit: Ford)

On Thursday, Ford Motor Company announced that it has secured 60 GWh of battery cells that will allow it to build 600,000 electric vehicles by late 2023. And it says it has contracts for cells that will allow it to build 1.4 million EVs by 2026, 70 percent of the 2 million EVs it plans to build globally that year.

"Ford's new electric vehicle lineup has generated huge enthusiasm and demand, and now we are putting the industrial system in place to scale quickly," said Jim Farley, Ford’s president and CEO and president of Ford Model e. "Our Model e team has moved with speed, focus, and creativity to secure the battery capacity and raw materials we need to deliver breakthrough EVs for millions of customers."

The automaker says that its plan for 2023 will consist of 270,000 Mustang Mach-Es for North America, Europe, and China, 150,000 F-150 Lightnings for North America, 150,000 e-Transit vans for North America and Europe, and it will launch an additional electric SUV in Europe, building 30,000 in 2023 before ramping up production significantly in 2024.

Enlarge / The Ford Mustang Mach-E has had a few teething troubles since its launch in 2021. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

Ford has to recall nearly 49,000 Mustang Mach-Es, and it told dealers to temporarily halt sales of the electric vehicle while it works to solve a bug in the propulsion system.

The news, first reported by CNBC , affects some Mach-Es built between May 27, 2020, and May 24, 2022, though Ford says not all of the roughly 100,000 electric crossovers will need to be recalled.

The problem is caused by overheating in the high voltage battery connectors—if this occurs, the Mach-E may not start. Should the problem arise while the EV is being driven, that could lead to a complete loss of propulsion.