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.
Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
Ford says its finally cracked the code on cheap EVs.
The automaker announced plans to build “a family” of low-cost electric vehicles at its Kentucky assembly planrt, starting with a four-door, midsized $30,000 pickup truck in 2027. Ford touted the announcement as its “Model T moment” that will be more streamlined to help bring down costs and put the company on a path to profitability. And it comes at an inflection point for the iconic American automaker, with the company expected to lose over $5 billion on EVs and software this year alone.
The platforms will be scalable and adaptive to a variety of vehicle types, including trucks, vans, and SUVs. The new EVs will be software-defined, meaning they will have operating systems that can improve over time through over-the-air updates. The batteries will have lithium iron phosphate (LFP) chemistries that are more durable, faster charging, and more affordable than its current lineup of EVs. And the manufacturing process will transform from a single assembly line, popularized over 120 years ago with the Model T, into an “assembly tree” with multiple lines starting simultaneously before joining together.
The new vehicle platform and manufacturing process are the product of Ford’s three-year-old Silicon Valley-based “skunkworks” project that the company empowered to create throw out all the old processes and create something new from scratch.
“This is a bold and difficult undertaking to compete with the best in the world,” Doug Field, Ford’s chief EV, digital and design officer, said in a briefing with reporters on Monday. “We started with a blank sheet to fight complexity and do something truly new.”
‘Universal’ platform
The company didn’t reveal a new vehicle today — although a prototype of the next-gen truck exists and was recently shared with a select group of factory workers. In a video, workers described the new vehicle as “revolutionary.”
But the company did describe in detail the process that it will use to create the new modular platform. The new “universal” vehicle platform uses 20 percent fewer parts than a typical vehicle, with 25 percent fewer fasteners and 40 percent fewer workstations dock-to-dock in the plant. That results in a fast assembly time of about 15 percent as compared to traditional vehicle manufacturing. And when all’s said and done, Ford estimates that its new low-cost EVs will have a lower cost of ownership over five years as compared to a three-year-old Tesla Model Y.
... continue reading