Ford turns to F1 and bounties to construct a $30,000 electrical truck

It must. Ford took a $19.5 billion hit in December and ended manufacturing of its battery-electric F-150 Lightning. It will probably’t afford for this new EV enterprise technique to fall flat.

Ford’s wager on a line of reasonably priced EVs started a number of years in the past with a skunkworks crew led by Alan Clarke, a 12-year Tesla veteran. Items of its plan had been revealed final August, when Ford mentioned it might ditch its conventional transferring meeting line and make investments $2 billion in its Louisville manufacturing facility to undertake a brand new manufacturing system that guarantees to hurry up manufacturing by 15%.

The corporate mentioned on the time that its line of EVs could be constructed on a common platform with single-piece aluminum unicastings — giant elements forged as one piece to eradicate elements and permit for quicker meeting — and lithium iron phosphate batteries with tech licensed from China’s CATL.

Now Ford is sharing extra specifics in a flurry of weblog and social media posts on the way it will fulfill its promise of a fascinating EV truck that will probably be $20,000 cheaper than the common new car whereas nonetheless producing income. Ford didn’t share specs just like the vary, options, or charging occasions of this future EV. But it surely did reveal the way it plans to construct lighter, cheaper, extra environment friendly EVs made with fewer elements.

All of it begins with the common EV platform, or UEV. The platform will underpin a midsized truck first, then might assist a sedan, crossover, three-row SUV, and even small business vans, in accordance with Clarke. The UEV is Ford’s first “clear sheet” EV constructed from the bottom up — a strategic shift for the corporate, which constructed its Mustang Mach-E and the Lightning EVs utilizing present infrastructure and manufacturing practices.

“It’s a platform that’s constructed round effectivity,” Clarke mentioned in a briefing with the media. “It’s constructed round affordability to have the ability to make long-range electrical car journey reasonably priced to extra individuals.”

To attain that, Clarke got down to create a brand new tradition seeded by expertise from System 1 and corporations like Apple, Lucid Motors, Rivian, and Tesla, in addition to Auto Motive Energy, a startup acquired by Ford in 2023. The crew, which incorporates about 450 individuals at its base in Lengthy Seashore, California, and 200 individuals in an workplace in Palo Alto, additionally adopted a bounty program to assist engineers perceive how their day-to-day selections impression the client and the top product, Clarke mentioned in an interview with reporters.

The main target of the bounty program was effectivity. Numerical metrics had been assigned to each facet of the UEV, together with car mass, aerodynamic drag, and even particular car elements. In observe, this meant Ford may resolve to make use of a dearer half if it helped lower the burden of the EV, thereby making it extra environment friendly and cost-effective.

“We’ve been very centered on ensuring that the fee that we’re transferring from the product doesn’t take away worth,” Clarke mentioned. One instance is that even the bottom trim of the EV truck could have a power-folding mirror, a premium function on most autos, as a result of it decreases aerodynamic drag, in accordance with Clarke. The corporate saved cash by utilizing one motor, as a substitute of two, to deal with the mirror adjustment and the folding.

That obsession with effectivity included a crew of ex-System 1 engineers who labored intently with Ford’s design crew. The consequence, in accordance with Ford, is a midsized EV truck that’s 15% extra aerodynamically environment friendly than another pickup truck available on the market right now.

This crew of former F1 engineers used 3D-printed and machined elements to create a Lego-like construct for its take a look at car. Hundreds of 3D-printed elements, that are correct inside fractions of a millimeter of Ford’s simulations and might be swapped out in minutes, had been used to measure aerodynamics. These Lego-like prototypes had been utilized in wind tunnel testing early on — and sometimes — to measure aerodynamics, a course of that Ford historically used solely when the design of a car was almost full.

A pure place to focus was on the battery, which may account for about 40% of a car’s complete expense. A lighter, extra environment friendly car permits Ford to make use of a smaller battery, which reduces price. The tip consequence, in accordance with Clarke, will probably be an EV truck with about 15% extra vary, or 50 miles, than an equal pickup powered by gasoline.

The effectivity push additionally led the crew to undertake manufacturing ways adopted and popularized by Tesla, together with using aluminum unicastings and transferring from a 12-volt system to a 48-volt energy system that will probably be used for some car capabilities.

Ford additionally upended the electrical car structure of the UEV, taking a zonal strategy just like Tesla and Rivian. As an alternative of scattering dozens of digital management models (ECUs), or computer systems, all through the car, Ford has built-in a number of car capabilities into 5 major modules. This reduces complexity, price, and copper utilization and helped make the EV truck’s wire harness 4,000 toes shorter and 22 kilos lighter than one in every of its first-generation electrical autos, in accordance with Luccas Di Tullio, a software program engineer at Ford who beforehand labored at Auto Motive Energy.

Di Tullio mentioned the corporate carried the identical philosophy to the facility digital elements, discovering methods to share elements and scale back elements with a single module that manages energy distribution and battery administration and offers AC energy again to a buyer’s dwelling throughout an outage.

Ford additionally developed its personal software program for these 5 major ECUs, right down to the appliance layer, in accordance with Clarke. As a result of Ford owns the software program — to the bottom stage — it turns into very moveable, Clarke mentioned.

“Aside from with the ability to management the infotainment, what exhibits up on the screens, [and] the way you work together with the car, the entire physique controls then are immediately coupled,” he mentioned. “So you possibly can think about that most of the experiences that may solely be created by coupling all of the completely different sensors across the car at the moment are at our fingertips and beneath our personal management.”