I first thought Ford CEO Jim Farley was briefing me on a new car. It turned out to be something altogether more ambitious: A completely new way to make a car. Or, more precisely, EVs.
“No one's ever built a car in three pieces then fit them together at the end,” Farley says. “We build the front, rear, and middle. We build the whole middle, front, and the rear—and then, at the end, we put it together. No one's ever built a car that way.”
That approach stands in stark contrast to the usual way cars are made: pieced together bit by bit on a linear production line, one at a time, with engineers contorting themselves into tight spaces workstation after workstation.
Splitting the EV into three complete parts is potentially game-changing in terms of both speed and cost. In Ford's new system, an assembly line becomes an “assembly tree,” where instead of one long conveyor, three sub-assemblies run their own lines simultaneously, then join together. Because you have three smaller sections rather than an entire car to work on, it's possible to make large single-piece aluminum unicastings each for the front, middle, replacing dozens of smaller parts.
“Why do you want to build the car that way? Because the operator can build the car inside the car,” says Farley. “That's not how it works today. You have all these armatures and things to put in like instrument panels. Plus, there's no need for line-side parts, right? The parts go in the car as it's being built.”
Ford calls its new way of making EVs the “Ford Universal EV Production System,” and will spend $2 billion to set it up at the company's Louisville assembly plant. Ford says the new method will be 40 percent faster than the existing process there, and have a comparable reduction in workstations. Parts needed to make Ford's new EVs will be cut by 20 percent.
“It has 30 percent less fasteners,” says Farley, referring to the bolts, nuts, screws, rivets, clips, and clamps used to put vehicles together securely. The wiring harness in a coming midsize truck will be nearly a mile (1.3 km) shorter and 10 kg lighter. The savings go on.
A new way of making cars necessitates new car designs. That's where the “Ford Universal EV Platform” comes in: a brand new 400-volt architecture that uses this Duplo-style, three-part assembly. The scalable, modular system can be adapted to make a variety of EV shapes and sizes from B-segment cars to vans and three-row SUVs. And the mid section will use Ford-made lithium-iron phosphate (LFP) prismatic batteries that are cheaper and safer as the structural vehicle floor. That LFP battery, the kind favored in China, is 30 percent cheaper than a lithium battery.
The first vehicle from the Ford Universal EV Platform will come in 2027, a midsize four-door electric pickup with an impressively low targeted starting price of $30,000. Ford says it will be as fast as a Mustang EcoBoost, and have more passenger space than the current Toyota RAV4.