Ford has promised to deliver an electric truck next year starting at $30,000 that could compete with Chinese automakers without hurting profit margins. Ford said Tuesday that a combination of 3D-printed Lego-like parts, F1 thinking and an incentive program will help the company reach its goals.
You’ll need to do that. Ford took a $19.5 billion hit in December and ended production of the battery-electric F-150 Lightning. This new EV business strategy cannot afford to fail.
Ford’s bet on a series of affordable EVs began several years ago with the Skunk Works team led by 12-year Tesla veteran Alan Clark. Part of the plan was revealed last August, when Ford announced it would eliminate traditional moving assembly lines and invest $2 billion at the Louisville plant to install a new production system that would speed manufacturing by 15%.
The company said at the time that its EV line would be built on a universal platform with one-piece aluminum unicast (large parts cast as one piece to reduce parts and enable faster assembly) and lithium iron phosphate batteries using technology licensed from China’s CATL.
Ford is now sharing more specifics in a flurry of blogs and social media posts about how it will deliver on its promise of desirable electric trucks that are profitable and cost $20,000 less than the average new car. Ford did not reveal specifications such as range, features or charging time for this future EV. But it has become clear how the company plans to make lighter, cheaper and more efficient EVs made with fewer parts.
It all starts with the Universal EV Platform (UEV). Clark said the platform could initially support medium-duty trucks, then sedans, crossovers, three-row SUVs and even light commercial vans. The UEV is Ford’s first “clean sheet” EV built from the ground up, and a strategic shift for the company, which used existing infrastructure and manufacturing methods to build the Mustang Mach-E and Lightning EV.
“This is a platform built around efficiency,” Clark said in a media briefing. “This is built around affordability, making long-distance electric vehicle travel affordable and accessible to more people.”
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To accomplish that, Clark set out to create a new culture seeded by talent from companies like F1, Apple, Lucid Motors, Rivian and Tesla, as well as Automotive Power, a startup acquired by Ford in 2023. The team, which has about 450 people in its Long Beach, Calif., office and 200 in its Palo Alto office, has also adopted an incentive program to help its engineers understand how their daily decisions impact customers. Clark spoke about the final product in an interview with reporters.
The focus of the incentive program was efficiency. Numerical indicators were assigned to every aspect of the UEV, including vehicle mass, aerodynamic drag, and even specific vehicle parts. In practice, this meant that Ford could decide to use more expensive parts if it helped reduce the weight of the EV, thereby making it more efficient and cost-effective.
“We are very focused on making sure that the value is not compromised by the cost that we move out of the product,” Clark says. One example, Clark said, is that even the base trim of EV trucks will have power-folding mirrors, which are a premium feature on most vehicles because they reduce drag. The company saved money by using one motor instead of two to handle adjusting and folding the mirrors.
The focus on efficiency also included a team of former F1 engineers who worked closely with Ford’s design team. The result is a mid-duty electric truck that is 15% more aerodynamically efficient than any other pickup truck on the market today, according to Ford.
This team of former F1 engineers used 3D printed and machined parts to create a Lego-like build for their test vehicle. The aerodynamic measurements used thousands of 3D-printed components that are accurate to within a fraction of a millimeter of Ford’s simulations and can be replaced in minutes. These Lego-like prototypes were used early and often in wind tunnel tests to measure aerodynamics. This process has traditionally been used by Ford only when a vehicle design is nearly complete.
Naturally, the focus was on the battery, which can account for around 40% of a vehicle’s total cost. Making vehicles lighter and more efficient allows Ford to use smaller batteries, lowering costs. The end result is an EV truck with about 15 percent (50 miles) more range than a comparable gasoline-powered pickup truck, Clark said.
The push for efficiency also led the team to adopt manufacturing strategies adopted and popularized by Tesla, such as the use of unicast aluminum and moving from a 12-volt system to a 48-volt power system for some vehicle functions.
Ford has also turned the UEV electric vehicle architecture upside down, taking a zone approach similar to Tesla and Rivian. Instead of having dozens of electronic control units (ECUs) or computers scattered throughout the vehicle, Ford has consolidated multiple vehicle functions into five main modules. Lucas Di Tullio, a Ford software engineer who previously worked at Automotive Power, says this reduces complexity, cost and copper usage, making the EV truck’s wiring harness 4,000 feet shorter and 22 pounds lighter than in the first generation of electric vehicles.
Di Tullio said the company is bringing the same philosophy to its power electronic components, finding ways to reduce parts by sharing components in a single module that manages power distribution and battery management and provides AC power to customers’ homes during power outages.
According to Clark, Ford has also developed proprietary software for these five major ECUs, all the way down to the application layer. Because Ford owns the software (down to the lowest level), it’s very portable, Clark said.
“Besides being able to control the infotainment and what shows up on the screen, [and] “How we interact with the vehicle ties all of our body controls directly together. So you can imagine that many of the experiences that can only be created by coupling all the different sensors around the vehicle are now at our fingertips and under our own control.”
