Ford promises to deliver an EV truck next year that starts at $30,000 and can compete with Chinese automakers without undermining profit margins. A combination of 3D-printed Lego-like parts, Formula 1 thinking and a rewards program will help the company achieve that goal, Ford said Tuesday.
You should. Ford earned $19.5 billion in December and ended production of its battery-electric F-150 Lightning. This new EV business strategy cannot afford to fall flat.
Ford’s bet on a range of affordable EVs began several years ago with a skunkworks team led by Alan Clarke, a 12-year Tesla veteran. Pieces of its plan were revealed last August, when Ford said it would abandon the traditional moving assembly line and invest $2 billion at its Louisville plant to adopt a new manufacturing system that promises to speed production by 15 percent.
The company said at the time that the EV range would be built on a general-purpose platform with aluminum monocoques — large components cast as one piece to eliminate parts and faster assembly — and lithium iron phosphate batteries with technology licensed from China’s CATL.
Now Ford is sharing more details on a a flurry of blog and social media posts on how it will deliver on its promise of a desirable EV truck that will be $20,000 cheaper than the average new vehicle while still turning a profit. Ford did not share specifications such as the range, features or charging times of this future EV. But he revealed how he plans to build lighter, cheaper, more efficient electric vehicles built with fewer components.
It all starts with the universal EV or UEV platform. The platform will first support a midsize truck, and then could support a sedan, crossover, three-row SUV and even light commercial trucks, according to Clarke. The UEV is Ford’s first “clean sheet” EV built from the ground up — a strategic shift for the company, which built the Mustang Mach-E and Lightning EVs using existing infrastructure and manufacturing practices.
“It’s an efficiency-based platform,” Clarke said at a media briefing. “It’s built around affordability to be able to make long-range electric vehicle travel accessible to more people.”
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To achieve this, Clarke set out to create a new culture with talent from Formula 1 and companies such as Apple, Lucid Motors, Rivian and Tesla, as well as Auto Motive Power, a startup that was acquired by Ford in 2023. The team, which includes about 450 people at its base in Long Beach, California, and 200 people in the adoption of a Paloun program in the office. Their daily decisions affect the customer and the final product, Clarke said in an interview with reporters.
The focus of the bounty program was efficiency. Numerical measurements were mapped to every aspect of the UEV, including vehicle mass, aerodynamic drag, and even specific vehicle components. In practice, this meant that Ford could decide to use a more expensive part if it helped reduce the weight of the EV, thereby making it more efficient and economical.
“We’ve been very focused on making sure that the cost that we’re moving out of the product doesn’t take away from the value,” Clarke said. One example is that even the base trim of the EV truck will have a power folding mirror, a premium feature on most vehicles because it reduces aerodynamic drag, according to Clarke. The company saved money by using one motor, instead of two, for mirror adjustment and folding.
This obsession with efficiency involved a team of ex-Formula 1 engineers who worked closely with Ford’s design team. The result, according to Ford, is a mid-size EV truck that is 15 percent more aerodynamically efficient than any other pickup truck on the market today.
This team of former F1 engineers used 3D printed and machined parts to create a Lego-like build for their test vehicle. Thousands of 3D-printed parts, which are accurate to within a fraction of a millimeter of Ford’s simulations and could be replaced in minutes, were used to measure aerodynamics. These Lego-like prototypes were used in wind tunnel tests early on — and often — to measure aerodynamics, a process Ford traditionally used only when a vehicle’s design was nearly complete.
A natural focus was the battery, which can account for around 40% of a vehicle’s total costs. A lighter, more efficient vehicle allows Ford to use a smaller battery, which lowers costs. The end result, according to Clarke, will be an EV truck with about 15 percent more range, or 50 miles, than an equivalent gas-powered pickup.
The drive for efficiency also led the team to adopt manufacturing tactics adopted and popularized by Tesla, including the use of aluminum unicastings and switching from a 12-volt system to a 48-volt power system to be used for certain vehicle functions.
Ford has also upgraded its UEV electric vehicle architecture, taking a zonal approach similar to Tesla and Rivian. Instead of scattering dozens of electronic control units (ECUs) or computers throughout the vehicle, Ford has integrated multiple vehicle functions into five main units. That reduces complexity, cost and copper usage and helped make the EV truck’s wiring 4,000 feet shorter and 22 pounds lighter than one of its first-generation electric vehicles, according to Luccas Di Tullio, a software engineer at Ford who previously worked at Auto Motive Power.
Di Tullio said the company had the same philosophy in power electronics, finding ways to share components and reduce components with a single unit that manages power distribution and battery management and provides AC power back to the customer’s home during an outage.
Ford also developed its own software for those five main ECUs, down to the application level, according to Clarke. Because Ford owns the software — at the lowest level — it becomes very portable, Clarke said.
“In addition to being able to control the entertainment, what appears on the screens, [and] how you interact with the vehicle, then all body controls are directly connected,” he said. “So you can imagine that many of the experiences that can only be created by connecting all the different sensors around the vehicle are now in our hands and under our control.”
