is transportation editor with 10+ years of experience who covers EVs, public transportation, and aviation. His work has appeared in The New York Daily News and City & State.
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To say that Ford has struggled to make profitable electric vehicles would be an understatement. The company recently pulled the plug on its F-150 Lightning, a truck once heralded as the most important EV ever made, after taking a staggering $19.5 billion hit on its EV investments in 2025. A new focus on hybrids and extended-range EVs, as well as internal-combustion engine vehicles that still bring in the most revenue, are now the new way forward for the iconic 122-year old company. Everything old is new again.
But Ford still sees EVs as the future — just not oversize ones with “no path to profitability,” like the Lightning, as Andrew Frick, president of Ford Model e and Ford Blue, said last year. Instead, the automaker is betting the farm on more affordable EVs, purpose-built with unique designs and smaller batteries, that can reignite customer demand while also turning a profit. Oh, and they need to be super fun to drive, too.
Tasked with this monumental challenge is Ford’s Silicon Valley-based skunkworks lab, led by Alan Clarke, the automaker’s executive director for EV programs and a 12-year veteran of Tesla. So far, Ford has hidden much of that work from the public — but now it’s ready to start showing off. In a briefing with a small group of reporters last week, Clarke pulled back the curtain on Ford’s so-called Universal EV Platform (UEV), which will eventually underpin a whole family of low-cost EVs, starting with a $30,000 midsize truck in 2027.
The team of around 500 engineers, spread across Silicon Valley and Los Angeles, is organized around two basic principles: efficiency and affordability. Success in the former — shedding weight, reducing friction, enhancing aerodynamics — is seen as absolutely critical in boosting the latter. And now the skunkworks team is getting ready to graduate to the main event, Clarke said. The product is being fully integrated into Ford’s manufacturing engine, with the goal to combine innovation with the company’s massive scale. In other words, Ford’s UEV team is moving past the design phase and into the “heavy lifting” of securing a supply chain and preparing for mass production.
“Once you do that, it’s much less of a ‘skunkworks’ model and much more the way that Ford operates. And so, it is smaller than a typical program, yes; but it’s also the largest product and platform change that Ford has done in at least a decade.”
Ford is using low-cost LFP batteries for its new EVs. Image: Ford
Bounties and batteries
The biggest impediment in bringing down the cost of an EV, Clarke says, is the battery, which typically comprises about 40 percent of the total cost of the vehicle. But rather than hold out hope for a mythical, long-promised innovation, like solid-state batteries, Ford’s skunkworks team opted instead to focus on squeezing the most range out of the smallest possible battery pack.
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