Earlier this year, Ford CEO Jim Farley revealed that the automaker has been working on developing its own, low-cost EV platform for over two years now, which was originally aimed at the company’s many Chinese rivals. Since then, we’ve learned more and more about this Ford EV skunkworks effort – including, it seems, the fact that the team behind it is using a more streamlined approach to development.
“And the way they’re developing the vehicle is very different than the traditional way OEMs have developed vehicles in a linear, progressive process, a process we’ve basically been incrementally improving over the last 120 years or so, where it’s a systems integration process,” Ford CFO John Lawler stated as the recent Deutsche Bank Global Auto Industry Conference. “It’s agile. The engineers do not rely on suppliers for design. They’ll work with suppliers. We go down into the supply base a couple of tiers.”
“We will own the entire electrical architecture. It’s a distributed electrical architecture. We’ll own the software on the modules, the systems integration between the vehicle and the digital architecture and then the experiences that come from that, the pace of development, and then the cost structure. We’re developing those vehicles to be competitive with a return at between $25,000 and $30,000. And the thing is we have people that have done that in the past and they’re doing it for us now.”
The Ford EV skunkworks team is led by former Tesla engineering director Alan Clarke, and has been operating in total secrecy and more like a startup in Irvine, California. Farley has recently made it quite clear that the automaker is quite literally betting its future on this effort, which will lead to the creation of a $30k crossover set to launch in late 2026, followed by a small pickup and potentially a dedicated ride share vehicle.
We’ll have more on Ford’s skunkworks EV team soon, so be sure and subscribe to Ford Authority for continuous Ford news coverage.
Comments
Lets hope they are 48V to reduce weight and dropped can-bus and went with redundant gigabit ethernet. Maybe they can drop some suppliers to so they can control their own software update progress.
Well the Skunkworks EV was at first touted to be a 25k car now Fords saying 25 to 30k by the time it reaches production it should be 35 to 45k.