Ford turns to F1 and bounties to build a $30,000 electric truck
Source: TechCrunch
Ford’s $30,000 EV Truck – How the Company Plans to Pull It Off
Ford is promising to deliver an EV truck next year that starts at $30,000 and can compete with Chinese automakers without undermining profit margins. A combination of 3D‑printed Lego‑like parts, Formula 1 thinking, and a bounty program will help the company hit that target, Ford said Tuesday.
It will have to. Ford took a $19.5 billion hit in December and ended production of its battery‑electric F‑150 Lightning. It can’t afford for this new EV business strategy to fall flat.
The Origin of the Affordable‑EV Bet
Ford’s bet on a line of affordable EVs began several years ago with a skunkworks team led by Alan Clarke, a 12‑year Tesla veteran. Pieces of its plan were revealed last August, when Ford said it would ditch its traditional moving assembly line and invest $2 billion in its Louisville factory to adopt a new production system that promises to speed up manufacturing by 15 %.
- The new line of EVs will be built on a universal platform with single‑piece aluminum unicastings—large components cast as one piece to eliminate parts and allow for faster assembly.
- Power will come from lithium‑iron‑phosphate (LFP) batteries with technology licensed from China’s CATL.
Now Ford is sharing more specifics in a flurry of blog and social‑media posts on how it will fulfill its promise of a desirable EV truck that will be $20,000 cheaper than the average new vehicle while still generating profits. Ford didn’t share specs like range, features, or charging times of this future EV, but it did reveal how it plans to build lighter, cheaper, more efficient EVs made with fewer parts.
The Universal EV Platform (UEV)
The platform will underpin a mid‑sized truck first, then could support a sedan, crossover, three‑row SUV, and even small commercial vans, according to Clarke. The UEV is Ford’s first “clean‑sheet” EV built from the ground up—a strategic shift for the company, which built its Mustang Mach‑E and Lightning EVs using existing infrastructure and manufacturing practices.
“It’s a platform that is built around efficiency,” Clarke said in a briefing with the media.
“It’s built around affordability to be able to make long‑range electric vehicle travel affordable to more people.”
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Building the Culture & the Bounty Program
To achieve that, Clarke set out to create a new culture seeded by talent from Formula 1 and companies like Apple, Lucid Motors, Rivian, and Tesla, as well as Auto Motive Power, a startup acquired by Ford in 2023.
- Team size: ~450 people in Long Beach, CA, and ~200 people in Palo Alto.
- Bounty program: Engineers receive numerical metrics for every aspect of the UEV—vehicle mass, aerodynamic drag, specific parts, etc. The program rewards decisions that improve efficiency even if they involve a higher‑cost component.
“We’ve been very focused on making sure that the cost that we’re moving from the product doesn’t remove value,” Clarke said.
Example: The base trim of the EV truck will have a power‑folding mirror—a premium feature—because it reduces aerodynamic drag. The company saved money by using a single motor (instead of two) to handle both mirror adjustment and folding.
Image Credits: Ford
Engineering for Efficiency
- Aerodynamics: A team of ex‑Formula 1 engineers used 3D‑printed and machined parts to create a Lego‑like build for the test vehicle. Thousands of components, accurate within fractions of a millimeter of Ford’s simulations, could be swapped out in minutes and were used repeatedly in wind‑tunnel testing.
- Result: The midsized EV truck is 15 % more aerodynamically efficient than any other pickup on the market today.
Battery & Range
A lighter, more efficient vehicle allows Ford to use a smaller battery, which reduces cost. The end result, according to Clarke, will be an EV truck with about 15 % more range (≈ 50 miles) than an equivalent gasoline‑powered pickup.
Manufacturing Tactics
- Adoption of aluminum unicastings (as popularized by Tesla).
- Shift from a 12‑volt to a 48‑volt power system for certain vehicle functions.
Zonal Architecture
Ford took a zonal approach similar to Tesla and Rivian: instead of scattering dozens of electronic control units (ECUs) throughout the vehicle, it integrated multiple functions into five main modules. This reduces complexity, cost, and copper usage, making the EV truck’s wire harness 4,000 feet shorter and 22 lb lighter than a conventional design.
The article continues beyond this point, but the core details of Ford’s strategy for a $30,000 EV truck are captured above.
Power Electronics and Software Integration at Ford
Ford’s first‑generation electric vehicles, according to Luccas Di Tullio, a software engineer at Ford who previously worked at Auto Motive Power, share a common philosophy when it comes to power‑electronic components.
Di Tullio said the company carried the same philosophy to the power‑electronic components, finding ways to share components and reduce parts with a single module that manages power distribution and battery management and provides AC power back to a customer’s home during an outage.
Ford also developed its own software for those five main ECUs, down to the application layer, according to Clarke. Because Ford owns the software — to the lowest level — it becomes very portable, Clarke said.
“Other than being able to control the infotainment, what shows up on the screens, [and] how you interact with the vehicle, all of the body controls then are directly coupled,” he said. “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.”