There’s been a lot of chaos in the world of electric vehicles recently, and Ford has taken advantage of it to create its secret team of low-cost electric vehicles.
A TechCrunch review of LinkedIn data found that Ford has built this group of about 300 employees over the past year. That includes about 50 coming from Rivian, more than 20 from Tesla and a dozen from cash-strapped Canoo. It also hired about 10 employees from Lucid Motors and a handful from Apple’s recently disbanded EV team known as Project Titan.
Ford has also recruited two senior aerodynamicists away from Formula 1 teams to work on the project.
The development of the secretive team comes as Ford, like its rivals, looks for ways to dramatically lower the cost of electric vehicles in a bid to catch Tesla while fending off cheap competition in China. “All of our EVs teams are ruthlessly focused on the cost and efficiency of our EV products because the ultimate competition will be the affordable Tesla and the Chinese OEMs,” CEO Jim Farley said in February when he revealed the project on an analyst call. .
The newly reported hires add to a group that Ford already bolstered with its late 2023 acquisition of a startup called Auto Motive Power, or AMP. This team of more than 100 people was brought in at Ford to help advance work on a low-cost electric vehicle platform intended to power next-generation vehicles that could truly compete with Tesla at the mass-market level.
Ford was already growing the team before the acquisition. The main hub is in Irvine, California, the same place Rivian claims as its headquarters. In the second half of 2023, Ford hired about a dozen former Rivian employees, many of them engineers. He also brought in Canoo’s former director of software operations and a senior developer. (Canoo has a large office in nearby Torrance, California.)
Hiring accelerated in early 2024, with Ford bringing in a senior mechanical designer who worked on Tesla’s “gigacasting” team. This effort involves creating the underside of a vehicle in just a few large pieces as opposed to welding or riveting many more together in an effort to simplify the process.
Rivian’s decision to lay off 10% of its workforce in February also appears to have offered Ford an opportunity to acquire talent, as the Advanced EV team hired another dozen engineers in the coming months. Ford also hired Canoo’s former vice president of engineering in May.
More recently, Ford established the team’s presence in Palo Alto. It hired electrical engineers and program managers from AV provider Nuro (which restructured in 2023), Lucid Motors (which cut 1,300 jobs last year) and eVTOL startup Joby. In May and June 2024, it also added several Project Titan engineers to its Palo Alto office.
Very few of the new hires Ford has brought to the project in the past year or so have come from outside the electric car world. Those that did tended to come from eVTOL startups like Joby, Archer and Supernal.
The company declined to answer specific questions about how it is building the team, which is known internally as the Ford Advanced EV. He also noted that some of the work being done by Ford Advanced EV could be applied to other efforts across the company, not necessarily just the low-cost EV project.
“The Ford Advanced EV team is part of a global effort to build focused technology and product development teams locally in the best centers of talent. This team is leading the development of groundbreaking EV products and technologies,” said Doug Field, Ford’s EV chief digital and design officer, in a statement to TechCrunch.
