As you probably know by now, Ford was the first of the US “big three” to appear serious about EVs. Their lead was, however, short lived. Today while EV numbers are still small for the big three in US sales GM has passed Ford.
The biggest problem was that Ford (and GM) didn’t really build competitive vehicles, priced them way below their cost to manufacture and then hoped people didn’t want to buy them. In the mean time Tesla and lots of Chinese manufacturers made better, less expensive vehicles and at least for Tesla, sold them at a profit.
Well, it is sounding like Ford is serious this time. Ford president Jim Farley is talking about a new platform that is just for EVs, using LFP batteries, using gigacastings and changing the production system more in line with Tesla’s proposed (but not yet implemented) unboxed process. I watched quite a few videos about this and this one seemed to have the most useful information with a minimum of BS.
While the new platform is designed for a whole list of different vehicle types the first on the list is a pickup truck for around $30,000. It will be between the size of the current Maverick and current Ranger. Farley even took an obvious dig at Slate by saying it won’t just be something totally stripped down.
We will have to wait to see if they succeed but what they are saying makes sense and Farley seems pretty serious.
