Inside Ford's effort to make EVs more affordable
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Early designs of Ford's new electric mid-size pickup truck. Photo courtesy of Ford
Ford is chasing physics to make electric vehicles more affordable, even borrowing aerodynamic tricks from F1 racing in the quest to squeeze out better performance at a far lower cost.
Why it matters: Ford, like the rest of the industry, got burned on EVs, writing off $19.5 billion worth of investments on cars no one wanted to buy — but it's not abandoning its electric ambitions.
- Ford's bet is that people will prefer a well-equipped battery-powered car over a gas model if the price is right.
Driving the news: A $30,000 mid-sized pickup truck, due in 2027, is the initial test of the carmaker's latest strategy.
- It's the first in a family of vehicles to be built on a new low-cost EV platform Ford secretly began working on in 2022 — three years before announcing the write-off in the massive strategic reset.
- Other models, potentially including compact SUVs, sedans and commercial vans, will follow over the next decade.
The big picture: Ford CEO Jim Farley calls it "one of the most audacious and important projects in Ford's history."
- The universal EV platform is the auto giant's answer to the rapid rise of Chinese rivals, whose low-cost, high-tech vehicles are taking over virtually every market outside of the U.S.
"Their cost, the quality of their vehicles is far superior to what I see in the west," Farley said at last summer's Aspen Ideas Festival.
- "We are in a global competition with China — and it's not just EVs. And if we lose this, we do not have a future at Ford."
Friction point
EVs are a hard sell for most Americans because they require too many sacrifices: they cost more than gas models, have a limited driving range and take too long to refuel.
- Most of that comes down to the battery, which accounts for 40% of an EV's total cost and 25% of its weight.
- Want more driving range? Easy: Add a bigger battery.
- But that makes the car pricier and less efficient — like a big, thirsty V8 engine that gets lousy gas mileage.
The challenge, then, is to come up with the EV equivalent of a gas engine turbo-charger to squeeze more miles out of a smaller battery.
Less is more
Ford's answer was to start over. A skunkworks team in California led by former Tesla engineer Alan Clarke rethought every aspect of the vehicle's design — and is now detailing the effort in a series of blog posts and videos.
Between the lines: It started with a culture shift.
- Instead of the usual turf wars over engineering decisions on individual components, the team obsessed over the vehicle as a total system.
- Every choice was weighed using a numerical "bounty" tied directly to its impact on battery size and efficiency.
- Raise the roof by one millimeter? That adds $1.30 in battery cost and cuts half a mile of range. Worth it? The stakes were made clear to everyone.
The team's goal was to radically simplify the vehicle's design by reducing the number of parts, believing "the best part is no part."
How it works: The coming truck's body is comprised of just two lightweight aluminum castings — compared to 146 welded parts in the body of a comparable Ford Maverick pickup.
- A simplified in-house "zonal" electrical architecture cuts 4,000 feet of wiring, trims 22 pounds and enables smarter energy management and faster charging.
- The Michigan-made battery uses cheaper lithium iron phosphate (LFP) chemistry licensed from China's CATL. The cells are packed so efficiently that the battery forms part of the truck's skeleton.
Ordinarily, LFP means less range. Ford's bet: Make up the difference everywhere else.
Racing for every mile
The intrigue: Ford adopted the competitive mindset of F1 racing to hunt for every aerodynamic edge.
- Before designing the truck itself, engineers tested thousands of 3D-printed and machined parts in a wind tunnel, isolating which tweaks delivered the biggest gains in range and battery cost.
- They sculpted the roofline to shed high-speed air in an efficient teardrop shape that skips over the truck bed entirely.
By the numbers: Just changing the design of the mirrors added 1.5 miles of driving range.
- Engineers also smoothed the underbody like a race car's — making bolts flush with the floor and channeling air flow around the front tires and suspension — adding another 4.5 miles of range.
- Ford estimates the new truck is 15% more aerodynamic than any other pickup on the market, good for 50 miles of extra driving range.
Reality check: Many of these techniques are being adopted by other carmakers, too.
- Tesla, for example, introduced giant castings in placed of welded bodies in 2020, but the industry continues to leap ahead with improvements.
- Rivian cut 1.6 miles of wiring and streamlined the computers in its EVs in 2024. Now, in a joint venture with Volkswagen, it's further developing the electrical architecture for their next wave of EVs.
The bottom line: Racing is a game of inches, where every small decision matters. The same can be said in the race to develop affordable EVs.
