Ford’s Coming New $30K Electric Pickup Is the Start Of Something Much Bigger

Ford sees the development of its new global family of affordable electric vehicles as a game-changer. But just as important as the vehicles themselves, if not more so, has been completely rethinking how those vehicles will be built from the ground up, creating a broader blueprint that can be applied across the company as it moves into the future.

The key to the project has been an internal skunkworks team that started with a blank slate, throwing out traditional notions of how to design and engineer a vehicle. It’s a group that grew from a single employee to about 450 in Long Beach, California, supported by another 200 at the company’s Silicon Valley facility in Palo Alto.

Soon, we’ll get to see the fruits of the team’s efforts in the form of an all-new, electric-powered midsize pickup truck arriving in 2027, followed by plans for two- and three-row SUVs, a subcompact and larger sedan, and a van over an undisclosed timeline.

With the innovation and product optimization work largely complete, the team has been busy hardening the truck’s design, getting the supply chain to deliver parts, and merging the program into Ford proper.

While it’s less of a skunkworks project now, it’s still smaller than a typical Ford program. That’s despite the fact that it’s arguably the largest platform and product change ever undertaken by the automaker, according to Alan Clarke, who leads Ford’s Advanced Electric Vehicle Development Team behind it all.

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Ford’s Alan Clarke

What Makes These New Models Different?

The biggest headliner has been the development of Ford’s all-new Universal Electric Vehicle (UEV) platform, which will underpin everything from small, subcompact vehicles on up. According to Ford, the platform reduces parts by about 20 percent compared with a typical Ford program, requiring 25 percent fewer fasteners and 40 percent fewer workstations in the Louisville, Kentucky, plant that most recently assembled the Ford Escape. The plant is being retooled to bring in the entirely new production system.

The new EVs will also benefit from the use of a lower-cost, lithium iron phosphate (LFP) battery assembled at its own factory. They will have more advanced driver-assistance technology as the company works toward Level 3 autonomous driving, which it aims to have on the road in these vehicles by sometime in calendar year 2028, said Clarke.

What won’t be materially different for the truck, at least, will be its styling. While there was a huge emphasis on aerodynamics, we’re assured the truck won’t look like a lozenge. Its roofline was sculpted so that air will more easily slip over the bed, but we’re assured that the pickup will come out looking like a truck, with a familiarity to the segment that defines Ford as a brand.

“It is similar in enough ways to a pickup truck that it is recognizable and that will attract some customers who have already bought pickup trucks,” said Clarke. “But I suspect the majority of our customers are going to come out of SUVs and cars, even used vehicles because of the low cost of it.” Rather than focusing on it being a hardcore truck, which Ford already has plenty of, the team instead designed its cabin with more interior room than a Toyota RAV4 to bring in new buyers.

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Ford’s new LFP battery.

All About the Battery

Right now, a typical EV battery accounts for about 40 percent of the vehicle’s total cost, and as much as 25 percent of the car’s total weight—both factors the industry as a whole is working feverishly to reduce. Ford’s goal was to extract more miles of range from a smaller battery comprised of fewer parts. Customers expect at least 300 miles of range from an EV, said Clarke. While Ford hasn’t released any specifics yet, it seems safe to assume that the pickup will exceed the 300 number.

Ford’s new LFP battery is designed to be durable and at a lower cost as it has no nickel or cobalt; LFP is used in 80 percent of EVs sold in China today. The prismatic cells and battery packs will be sourced out of Ford’s new BlueOval battery plant in Marshall, Michigan. The truck is engineered so that the battery is part of the truck’s overall structure, eliminating the need for some connectors, closures, size, and mass, something the skunkworks team worked hard to develop.

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Shaped Like a Lozenge?

Another big factor is aerodynamics. As Saleem Merkt, Ford’s Advanced EV Aerodynamics Senior Manager, explained, going twice as fast the air holds you back twice as much, and you need eight times more power to maintain that speed. Half of the skunkworks aero team used to work in Formula 1, bringing a “fail fast, learn faster” mentality to the project. They looked at every detail of the truck under development and used the wind tunnel as a tool from the start to test 3D-printed parts. Among the details: A millimeter change in the roof height drove $1.30 savings in battery cost. It’s part of a new way of working called “bounty targets,” one that uses metrics to convert improvements into battery savings and how much range they would add.

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Ford’s new side mirror is 20 percent smaller and uses a single actuator, replacing the two motors traditionally used for adjustment and folding.

The result is a truck that Ford says is 15 percent more aerodynamic than any other pickup on the road today (the Ford Maverick and Hyundai Santa Cruz being the closest comparison), which translates into almost 50 more miles of range. Cost comes down with changes like the side mirror, above, that will use a single actuator to replace the two motors traditionally used for adjustment and folding. The entire body moves with a single motor, resulting in a mirror that’s 20 percent smaller with a more streamlined shape which adds another 1.5 miles of range, according to Ford.

Better Brains

Vehicles using the new platform have also moved to a zonal architecture, replacing about 30 electronic control units with five main modules, reducing the cost and complexity of the wire harness that is 4,000 feet shorter and weighs 22 pounds less than the systems Ford used in its first generation EVs. The major power electronics functions are consolidated into a single module called the Ebox.

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The Ford Ebox.

Additionally, Ford is moving to a 48-volt system for electronics and charging. The architecture and software were developed in-house, instead of relying on suppliers. It is designed to charge the battery faster, maximize its lifespan, and reduce total cost of ownership.

The platform uses a 400-volt charging system instead of 800-volt. Given that the platform will yield smaller vehicles, Ford decided that a 400-volt makes more sense. It is easier to source parts for and can better accommodate different battery chemistries in the future.

To further reduce weight, Ford is using unicastings, which replace multiple parts and fasteners with a single casting. Ford says it will make its truck 27 percent lighter than the competition. Compared with Ford’s own Maverick, the new truck replaces 146 parts with two main structural parts. This also requires fewer robots in the plant, said Vlad Bogachuk, chief engineer of Advanced Vehicle Structure Architecture. Clarke said the megacastings will be durable enough for a truck, and the large pieces are repairable to help reduce cost of ownership.

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The still-unnamed truck is moving into real-world testing now on tracks and city streets, so it won’t be long until we see what Ford’s team within a team has built. From what we’ve been able to glean thus far, it’s been a monumental effort, one that Ford is hoping will pay off in the long run.