To say that Ford has struggled to make profitable electric vehicles is an understatement. The company recently discontinued its F-150 Lightning, a truck that was once heralded as the most important EV, due in 2025 after incurring a massive loss of $19.5 billion on its EV investment. Hybrid and extended-range EVs, as well as a new focus on the internal-combustion engine vehicles that still bring in the most revenue, are now the new way forward for this iconic 122-year-old company. Everything old is new again.
But Ford still sees EVs as the future — not oversized vehicles with “no path to profitability” like the Lightning, as Andrew Frick, president of the Ford Model E and Ford Blue, said last year. Instead, the automaker is betting on more affordable EVs, built with unique designs and smaller batteries, that can generate profits as well as drive customer demand. Oh, and they should be a lot of fun to drive, too.
The massive challenge has been tasked with Ford’s Silicon Valley-based Skunkworks Lab, led by Alan Clark, the automaker’s executive director of EV programs and a 12-year Tesla veteran. Until now, Ford has hidden most of his work from the public – but now he’s ready to start showing off. In a briefing with a small group of reporters last week, Clark pulled back the curtain on Ford’s so-called Universal EV platform (UEV), which will eventually underpin an entire family of low-cost EVs starting with a $30,000 midsize truck in 2027.
The team of nearly 500 engineers spread across Silicon Valley and Los Angeles is organized around two core principles: efficiency and affordability. Success in the former – reducing weight, reducing friction, increasing aerodynamics – is seen as absolutely critical in promoting the latter. And now the Skunkworks team is getting ready for the main event, Clark said. The product is being fully integrated into Ford’s manufacturing engine with the goal of combining innovation with company scale. In other words, Ford’s UEV team is moving beyond the design phase and into the “heavy lifting” of securing the supply chain and preparing for mass production.
“Once you do that, it’s much more than a ‘skunkworks’ model and much more than the way Ford does things. And so, it’s smaller than a normal program, yes; but it’s also the biggest product and platform change Ford has made in at least a decade.”
Clark says the biggest hurdle to driving down the cost of an EV is the battery, which typically accounts for about 40 percent of the total cost of the vehicle. But rather than hold out hope for a mythical, long-promised innovation like solid-state batteries, Ford’s Skunkworks team opted to focus on squeezing maximum range from the smallest possible battery pack.
To do this, Ford introduced a new system it calls “Bounties” to guide its engineers’ decisions. These are numerical metrics assigned to key efficiency drivers such as vehicle mass and aerodynamic drag – factors that directly affect range and cost.
For example, a one millimeter change in ceiling height can save $1.30 in battery costs. Or perhaps a small increase in material costs could reduce brake drag, which then translates into better efficiency and range. As they model different materials and designs, Ford engineers are constantly thinking about these tradeoffs, thanks to the new bounty system, Clark said.
“Bounties are a very concrete way for every engineer, every product person, every designer to understand how their micro decisions on a day-to-day basis impact the customer and the final product,” he said.
In low-cost vehicles, it may seem counterintuitive to use a more expensive part simply because it is lighter. But by assigning a monetary value to the weight savings in terms of lower battery costs, Ford engineers can determine whether those types of parts actually reduce the overall cost of the entire vehicle.
Ford’s push to develop affordable EVs is also a battle against physics. Every inefficiency caused by drag takes away your range. At higher speeds, drag becomes even more of a hindrance. If you go twice as fast, the wind slows you down four times as much, and you need eight times as much power to keep going at that speed, says Clark.
With this in mind, Ford engineers teamed up with some of the brightest minds in Formula One to take direct aim at this problem. They streamlined the bottom of the UEV by making the bolt holes shallower, carefully arranging the air flow around the tires and suspension, and shaping some components to hide the front tires behind the rear tires. Estimated prize? Added 4.5 miles of range.
The side mirrors also needed rethinking. Instead of using separate motors for mirror adjustment and folding, Ford combined both functions into a single actuator that drives the entire mirror body. This made the mirror more than 20 percent smaller than normal, reducing mass, cost and drag. Estimated prize? 1.5 miles of additional range.
Weight is another enemy of aerodynamics. To slim down, Ford is using large aluminum unicasting for the first time, which the automaker estimates will improve weight by more than 27 percent compared to competitors. For reference, the Ford Maverick uses 146 structural parts in its front and rear structure. The new medium-sized electric pickup will use only two.
Ford aims to reduce its battery costs by adopting cheaper LFP batteries that avoid cobalt and nickel, two minerals that are the most expensive to purchase. Using prismatic cells, Ford developed a highly efficient cell-to-structure architecture that effectively turns the battery pack into part of the truck’s structure. Tesla is generally recognized as a pioneer in structural batteries; BMW, Volvo and now Ford are now seeing efficiency and weight gains in their use.
The UEV platform would be Ford’s first breakthrough in a zonal wiring system rather than a domain style. Zonal architecture means fewer electronic control units (ECUs), less wiring, and most importantly, reduced production costs. Tesla pioneered its use, and it has since been adapted by several EV-only shops, including Rivian and Scout.
But Clark challenged the idea that Ford was simply following those other automakers in adopting zonal architecture. He argues that the term is often used in marketing, despite actually referring to a form of zonal aggregation in most vehicles, where the ECUs primarily serve to short out the wiring harness while the logic remains centralized.
“In fact, very few vehicles existing in the world actually have zonal architectures,” he said.
In contrast, Ford’s approach moves that logic closer to where functions physically occur in the vehicle, Clark says. This harness further reduces complexity and allows compute resources to be used more dynamically in the car, depending on what tasks are needed at a given time.
Ford also extends this integration to power electronics. The DC-to-DC converter and AC charger now share the same board and components in a compact module, which also manages power delivery and battery management, and can provide AC power to the home during outages. By grouping these systems together and consolidating shared components, Ford created a small, serviceable module known as the e-Box.
Of course, there are tradeoffs. For example, with 400-volt architecture, Ford’s new EVs won’t charge as fast as 800-volt Hyundai and Kia EVs. Clark explained that after extensive internal study, the team concluded that 800-volt systems do not provide any meaningful charging or powertrain benefits for this vehicle segment. And Ford wanted the flexibility to support not only lithium iron phosphate batteries but also future chemistries, which would be more simple at 400 volts.
In addition to battling physics, Ford is also fighting political headwinds that are directly contributing to the slowdown in EV sales growth. But Clark says the company’s future success never depended on incentives like tax credits, which Ford always saw as “icing on the cake.”
As a 122-year-old legacy company with a vast network of suppliers, Ford always lagged behind more vertically integrated companies like Tesla in developing software-driven EVs. But the UEV project begins the necessary work of bringing most of those systems and components under Ford’s direct control, Clark says, so the company doesn’t have to negotiate with third-party companies about future feature improvements.
In a video presentation, Ford teased some of the designs under consideration for its future truck. Unlike most trucks today, Ford’s new electric pickup will be more aerodynamically designed with an angular hood and teardrop-shaped roof. Not your average high-riding truck with a blunt front-end, but another egg-shaped EV – a design trend that has been criticized for being overused.
Clark points out that if the aerodynamicists worked alone, the result would probably be a pure teardrop shape, which would be impractical and undesirable as a truck. Instead, by involving aerodynamic experts with other Ford designers, each decision becomes an opportunity for shared learning.
He added, “When you finally get to see the trucks, you can be the judge.” “We know we want people to like it immediately. They have to buy it. They have to like the way it looks.”
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