The secret is now out as Ford races toward building its first model, a new truck it says will be nearly as fast as a Mustang, travel around 300 miles on a single charge and feature in-car technology to compete with Tesla and China. It’s aiming for a 2027 launch and a price tag of around $30,000, the cost of a Toyota Camry.
Getting there means tearing up a century of manufacturing practices in a notoriously hidebound industry. At stake for Ford is securing a future beyond the gas-guzzling pickups and SUVs that have long defined its bottom line.
The project had been kept quiet from its 2022 start, led by veterans from Tesla and Apple who worked on designs out of a California office. Ford eventually brought in some of its own employees to help execute the vision. The process was filled with misunderstandings and distrust as the techie outsiders worked to win over the risk-averse industry veterans.
To build these new EVs, the company must use fewer people and simpler parts, and dismantle decades of engineering inertia. Chief Executive Jim Farley is calling it Ford’s new “Model T moment.” Rival automakers say overcoming China on EVs can’t be done, given their advantages: extensive government backing, low-cost labor and a massive head start.
Ford’s past electric models have racked up billions of dollars in losses. Farley, the CEO, has bemoaned them as having many more parts and costs than are necessary. Last year the company said it would kill its much-hyped electric F-150 pickup, which cost between $50,000 and about $77,000.
With its new truck, Ford says it has eliminated thousands of feet of heavy copper wiring, cut out hundreds of parts and made it 15% more aerodynamic than its other pickups.
The process included rethinking the assembly line, which Ford helped to pioneer. That process is traditionally iterative, slow and depends on scores of outside partners. On Ford’s new “assembly tree,” a modular system stamps out two massive, aluminum castings and a battery that get merged at the end of the process—closer to how Tesla and China’s automakers build EVs.
This isn’t the F-150 Lightning redux. This time, the automaker says it’s attempting to overhaul its EV strategy to finally convincepolarized American drivers that electric power remains the future of transportation with the right combination of low price, high style and useful tech inside the cabin. It’s built on Ford’s first EV platform designed from the ground-up, but the company isn’t pitching that as its biggest selling point, even in these days of soaring gas prices.
“People shouldn’t care about the powertrain in this, they should care about it being the best vehicle to drive every day,” said Alan Clarke, the former Tesla Inc. engineer who joined the automaker in 2022 to lead the project. “And then, okay, fourth or fifth on the list, it saves you money on gas.”
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Ford was more forthcoming on how it’s trying to squeeze every penny of cost out of what it calls its Universal Electric Vehicleplatform. “The best part is no part” has become the rallying cry of the 350-member team that has engineered Ford’s UEV to be lighter, sleeker and more electrically efficient so it can go farther on a charge and still start at a price that’s $20,000 less than the average cost of a new car in America. That mantra comes directly from Clarke’s former employer, where Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk urged Tesla’s team to do the same.
To streamline parts at Ford, Clarke instituted something he calls a “bounty culture,” that rewards engineers for finding innovative ways of reducing weight and cost. The result is a car that is 15% slipperier in the wind tunnel and takes 40% less time to build. Ford says it’s substantially lighter than rival EVs because it uses just two aluminum main structural parts compared to 146 structural parts on Ford’s Maverick compact pickup.
The company brought much of the design process in-house and relies less on outside suppliers. That means instead of waiting for three months to receive a prototype part from an outside vendor, Ford can turn around the fabrication of a test part in a couple weeks. That allows UEV engineers to experiment with more iterations of, say, a seat design.
“That allows us to have a lot of silly ideas and they birth great ideas for us to then take to the market,” explained Scott Anderson, a senior seating manager who works in the trim lab surrounded by hunks of foam and swatches of fabric.