In 2021, after Apple gave up on its secretive plans to build a driverless electric car, Doug Field left the technology company to embark on a mission impossible meant to save the American auto industry.
He rejoined Ford Motor, where he had started his career decades earlier, with the grand ambition of designing electric vehicles that would allow the century-old company to compete with Chinese carmakers, whose vehicles are hugely popular with consumers and breaking global sales records.
Mr. Field knew the old ways of Detroit wouldn’t do. Time was short, and to jolt the storied automaker into action he created an automotive start-up of sorts — a secretive lab near Los Angeles, with a satellite office in the heart of Silicon Valley, that he called a “skunk works.”
He recruited engineers and designers from electric vehicle makers like Tesla, Rivian and Lucid and from start-ups working on batteries, electronics and software, and promised them the kind of creative freedom that tech workers take for granted.
To shield his project from corporate meddling, anyone not on Mr. Field’s select team wasn’t even allowed through the door. No exceptions.
“They got to start over,” Mr. Field said of Tesla, which was established just over two decades ago and effectively created the market for electric cars. “We had to have a place inside of Ford with that opportunity.”
The auto industry is undergoing change the likes of which it hasn’t seen since the early 1900s, when Henry Ford’s Model T and moving assembly line transformed the economy and how people got around. The ubiquitous horse-drawn buggy was consigned to museums, while countless other businesses became obsolete.
Ford and other established carmakers are now staring down that kind of obsolescence, particularly as Chinese companies like BYD and Geely race forward, producing 60 percent of all electric vehicles worldwide.
The best hope is to leapfrog the Chinese by producing better batteries, more efficient electric motors and other breakthroughs and then doing it again and again. And the best hope for making those things happen are people like Mr. Field, who are trying to teach Detroit to be as innovative as Silicon Valley.
“I knew it would be a completely different challenge than anything I’d done before,” he said, “which was to try and change the course of a large organization.”
Nobody knows how this contest will play out, but there are already signs that the Western automakers are falling even further behind. Many of their most innovative and affordable battery-powered models are still years away. Mr. Field’s first vehicle isn’t expected to even go on sale until 2027.
Mr. Field, who has also worked at Tesla and Segway, is fully aware that teams like his have the fate of an entire industry in their hands. More than four million Americans work at car and parts factories, dealerships and repair shops.
President Trump is determined to turn back the clock on electric cars, even dropping strict fuel efficiency standards that favored them. But as most of the world pivots decisively away from the combustion engine, car executives see no choice but to stay the course.
“Most of our sales are outside the U.S.,” said Jim Farley, Ford’s chief executive and Mr. Field’s boss, “and we are running into the Chinese.”
One thing going for the underdog Western automakers is that there is plenty of room to improve how electric cars are made, and there is also no shortage of ambitious entrepreneurs wanting to make a go of it.
One Boston area start-up, AM Batteries, is among several companies working on machinery that can reduce the cost of battery manufacturing. The equipment made by the start-up forms layers of lithium, nickel and other materials into battery cells using a dry powder instead of the wet slurry used in most battery factories today.
The technology eliminates the need for a long drying process, does not generate toxic chemicals, and shortens the assembly line, saving time and money. And, if it can be put to use on a large scale, the company’s approach will make batteries — the most expensive part of an electric car — more affordable.
“What keeps me awake at night is knowing that engineers in China and Japan are doing the same thing,” said Lie Shi, AM’s chief executive.
AM, whose investors include the venture capital arms of Toyota and Porsche, is among dozens of young companies looking for ways to make electric vehicles cheaper and more practical.
Daqus Energy in Woburn, Mass., is trying to make batteries from plentiful organic materials rather than costly metals like lithium, nickel and cobalt. Estes Energy Solutions in San Francisco is developing a way to package battery cells that makes them lighter.
Niron Magnetics in Minnesota is working with Stellantis, the maker of Jeep and other brands, on substitutes for the rare earth metals required for electric motors, so that automakers are not dependent on supplies from China. There are many other examples.
“There is a lot of room to run with these technologies,” said Brian Potter, a structural engineer who recently wrote the book “The Origins of Efficiency.”
To help offset their lower energy density, the Universal EV platform will load up its battery pack more densely – traditional EV packs wasting 50% or more of their space due to inefficient design, according to Sam Abuelsamid, lead auto analyst with Telemetry Research. Ford approached this like “a puzzle,” explained Universal EV project leader Alan Clarke. “We’re trying to fit the most cells possible inside the pack.”
Whether the Universal EV team really has found the better, er, four-wheeled mousetrap is uncertain. It looks great on paper, and in what we’ve seen so far. It remains to be seen if it all will come together in practice.
And skeptics have questioned the decision to launch the program with a compact pickup, rather than a 2- or 3-row SUV. Hang tight, says Ford, those are coming.
The automaker has yet to release pertinent details. We know a version of the initial truck will deliver “over” 300 miles range, while project leader Clarke has advised there will be a lower-range, lower cost battery option, as well. We don’t yet know power and torque specs but it’s assumed there will be both 2- and 4-wheel-drive packages. As for pricing, Ford has suggested it will start at under $30,000, which will position the truck well in a market increasingly obsessed with “affordability.”
From a business standpoint, hitting Universal EV targets will be critical for Ford. CEO Jim Farley confirmed this month his company expects to continue losing money on its battery-electric operations through 2029, about when the new EV plant should be running nearer capacity. And, should demand exceed current expectations, we could see Ford tool up other lines to handle the assortment of different body styles the automaker is promising. We should get more insight by around this time next year.
Nice to see the phrase “skunk works” is still alive. I worked in two different “skunk works” at Bell Canada. IIRC, our label was borrowed from Lockheed (home of the U2 and SR71)
…who got it from the comic Li’l Abner
In the first video, I note that they describe the reduction in copper cabling in terms of vehicle weight. My first thought was that reducing the use of copper—a limited resource whose price is climbing—is a significant goal in itself.
“And skeptics have questioned the decision to launch the program with a compact pickup, rather than a 2- or 3-row SUV.”
Hallelujah! So many people want smaller pickups that aren’t made any more because the margins were much better on the behemoths