The Ford Motor Company dialed way back on its vehicle electrification plans last fall, after US President Donald Trump and the Republican majority in Congress prematurely killed the $7,500 federal EV tax credit. The iconic US automaker did not, however, dial back its plans for introducing a new, affordable EV to the US market next year. In fact, Ford has been dialing them up. The Not-So-Secret Skunkworks Project The affordable EV plan surfaced on the media radar in force during the early months of 2024, after Ford slipped word that it tasked a small “skunkworks” team to engineer a new EV from scratch along with a new manufacturing system, an effort headed up by former Tesla Director of New Program Engineering Alan Clarke. “The Intertubes lit up on February 6 when word leaked out that the Ford Motor Company has assigned a secret task force to develop an affordable electric vehicle, aimed at competing with the low-cost lineup of Tesla and various Chinese automakers,” CleanTechnica reported in 2024. “However, the secret is not so secret. Ford set the stage back in 2021, when it described the newly minted Ford+ plan as ‘the company’s biggest opportunity for growth and value creation since Henry Ford scaled production of the Model T.’” “Design work continues on Ford’s future-generation EVs. A skunkworks team in California is developing a smaller, low-cost, profitable, flexible EV platform capable of underpinning multiple vehicles at high volumes,” Ford elaborated. Tools, Tools, & More Tools The skunkworks reference has its roots in the world of 1940s comic strips, describing a small, secretive moonshot operation of sorts. Lockheed Martin famously adopted the moniker for its secret World War II projects and it was a natural fit for Ford’s affordable EV team, separately housed far away in its own secret, not-so-secret complex in Long Beach, California, far from the company’s Rust Belt headquarters. The operation has far outgrown itself in both size and secretiveness. In an elaborately illustrated online tour of the Skunkworks facility it posted earlier today, Ford noted that the original 120,000-square-foot building has acquired a new and somewhat larger companion facility next door to form the company’s new Electric Vehicle Development Center. Meanwhile, membership in the team has ballooned up to 350. That’s just the number working onsite in Long Beach exclusively on the skunkworks project, now formalized as Ford’s new Universal EV Platform. A floor-to-ceiling LED display at the facility enables the Long Beach team to communicate life-sized models with another 500 Ford employees scattered around Dearborn, Palo Alto, Louisville, and elsewhere in the company’s network, who are also assisting with the Universal EV Platform project. Then there’s the tools, tools, and more tools. “The Long Beach campus has multiple on-site fabrication shops, including ones dedicated to 3D printing and painting. These shops use machines to cut, drill, and smooth materials like metal and plastic, creating parts from scratch.” “Every team member has access to a fabrication shop for turnarounds on full-size prototypes that can take as little as 30 minutes or up to just a few days, allowing more iterations while saving time and money,” Ford adds. “Whether an engineer needs to craft from metal, foam, clay, or composites, they can do so with the site’s capabilities.” Tool highlights include seven milling towers for rapid life-sized modeling. “A five-axis Fooke 911 gantry machine with a large robotic arm can carve full-size vehicle models as large as a F-150 in a matter of days,” Ford enthuses. The many advantages of tool shop exclusivity are readily apparent to anyone who’s had to wait in line for access to battery testing equipment, too. “Having everything here, we can go back to the vehicle and see how it works, take parts off, test a cell,” notes Akshaya Srinivasan, the director of range, performance, and battery systems modeling at the new EVDC. “And it can all happen in one day,” Srinivasan emphasizes. Manufacturing The Affordable EV Of The Future, Next Year Srinivasan also notes the benefits of campus dynamics, recounting how a casual conversation with the powertrain team led to hundreds of dollars in battery cost savings. “Being together under one roof, it really does help. It allows us more conversations. You end up solving something more quickly,” she explains. “In the battery lab, a thermal shock chamber tests battery packs and an ultra-high precision coulometer technology simulates years of wear in weeks,” Ford writer Tim Newcomb elaborates. “Nearby, a thermal lab can house a full-size vehicle and mimic environmental extremes to see how batteries and other parts hold up. And a climatic chassis dyno lab — a simulation of wind resistance, speed, humidity, and grade using a vehicle strapped down and driving on 48-inch rollers — will help engineers spot efficiencies.” “Testing early, fail fast. That is one of our commandments,” Srinivasan summarizes. “We target zero failures, so we have to understand where they failed. Our goal is to build and design the system that rarely, if ever, fails in our customer’s hands.” The ultimate goal, of course, is to launch a reliable EV that is also an affordable EV. As described in today’s recap, the Universal EV Platform will enable Ford to churn out its forthcoming midsized electric truck at a rate 15% faster than units previously assigned to the Louisville Assembly Plant, with 20% fewer parts overall and 50% fewer cooling hoses. The savings is also expected to ripple into labor costs, as the improved ergonomics of assembling the new Universal EV Platform are expected to help reduce fatigue. In a press release last year, Ford also noted the savings from the Universal EV Platform include 25% fewer fasteners and 40% fewer work stations. “Take for instance the wiring harness in the new midsize truck; it will be more than 4,000 feet (1.3 kilometers) shorter and 10 kilograms lighter than the one used in our first-gen electric SUV,” Ford added. A Second Chance For The US EV Market US President Donald Trump almost single-handedly offset the destructive impact of the EV tax credit on February 28, when he launched a war against Iran that sent global fuel markets on an upwards spiral, thereby making EVs a more attractive and affordable option. By then, of course, it was too late for Ford and other automakers to re-reverse their near-term plans. However, as recently as August of last year, Ford was already setting the table for a new tree-like manufacturing concept in support of its affordable EV plans, with LFP batteries also playing a role. “The first model out of the box will be a mid-sized pickup truck available beginning in 2027, with a target price of $30,000 or thereabouts,” CleanTechnica reported. We’ll believe it when we see it, but it sure looks like Ford has cleared the decks to go up against Tesla, where the wobbly Cybertruck launched into the mid-sized electric truck market to the tune of spectacular failure. Ford previously had the larger T3 electric pickup truck in the planning stages, but that project has reportedly been pushed back in favor of the mid-sized truck. Photo: High tech milling machines are among the tools at work at the Ford Electric Vehicle Development Center in Long Beach, California, where plans for a new, affordable EV are taking shape (screenshot, courtesy of Ford).
