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Business Technology Equipment

Ford’s $30,000 Electric Pickup Is Miles Away From Lightning

Mark Hill of PCS Software joins us to discuss logistics as TT releases the Top 100 list of the largest logistics companies in North America. Tune in above or by going to RoadSigns.ttnews.com.  

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This isn’t the F-150 Lightning redux. This time, the automaker says it’s attempting to overhaul its EV strategy to finally convince polarized American drivers that electric power remains the future of transportation with the right combination of low price, high style and useful tech inside the cabin. It’s built on Ford’s first EV platform designed from the ground up, but the company isn’t pitching that as its biggest selling point, even in these days of soaring gas prices.

It’s an open question whether truck buyers will bet again on Ford and another electric pickup, even if this one does get better range.

EV market share in America has fallen by half since President Donald Trump removed consumer incentives last fall for buying battery-powered cars, which he derisively referred to as part of the “green new scam.” Ford’s EV sales plunged 70% in the first quarter, after it pulled the plug on its slow-selling F-150 Lightning and currently only offers one electric model — the 5-year-old Mustang Mach e.

In December, Ford said it would take $19.5 billion in charges for underperforming EV assets. Its top EV executive, Doug Field, announced last month that he is leaving the company.

While Ford allowed outsiders into its top-secret skunkworks operation for the first time last week, it’s still not ready to actually reveal the truck. Instead, as reporters were shepherded between buildings, a small pickup wrapped in black-and-white camouflage emerged from a black tent and zipped by. No photos were allowed and tour participants had their cellphone camera lenses covered over with tape as they entered the facility.

Clarke, a lanky, youthful engineer outfitted in a black leather bomber jacket, jeans and red-and-white Nike Air Jordan high tops, has devoted most of his career to making EVs mainstream. At Tesla, he led advanced vehicle development for many of the EV maker’s models, including the top-selling Model Y and the angular Cybertruck.

To streamline parts at Ford, Clarke instituted something he calls a “bounty culture,” that rewards engineers for finding innovative ways of reducing weight and cost. The result is a car that is 15% slipperier in the wind tunnel and takes 40% less time to build. Ford says it’s substantially lighter than rival EVs because it uses just two aluminum main structural parts compared to 146 structural parts on Ford’s Maverick compact pickup. 

The company brought much of the design process in-house and relies less on outside suppliers. That means instead of waiting for three months to receive a prototype part from an outside vendor, Ford can turn around the fabrication of a test part in a couple of weeks. That allows UEV engineers to experiment with more iterations of, say, a seat design.

The company brought much of the design process in-house and relies less on outside suppliers. (Ford via YouTube)

“That allows us to have a lot of silly ideas and they birth great ideas for us to then take to the market,” explained Scott Anderson, a senior seating manager who works in the trim lab surrounded by hunks of foam and swatches of fabric.

When Ford set out to engineer an affordable electric vehicle four years ago, it intended to develop a mainstream model similar to the slipstream SUV body style that had become the most popular shape for battery-powered vehicles. But once they floated the idea in consumer clinics, they realized a me-too EV would not win over skeptical buyers.

So two years ago, the automaker switched gears and decided to return to the pickup truck, but make it a far smaller and more affordable model than the F-150 Lightning plug-in it was already offering to a tepid reception. It wasn’t an easy decision.

“We struggled, we struggled a lot, ”Clarke said in an interview. “It’s really easy to make vanilla, it’s easy to make a washer, a toaster. It’s really hard to make something that ultimately tugs at the heartstrings.”

A big pickup like the Lightning never did. It was too expensive and all that towing and hauling depleted the battery too quickly. At its heart, though, Ford is a truck specialist and that history informs its new EV architecture.

Without a big gas engine up front, Ford was able to design the passenger compartment to be larger than the interior of Toyota Motor Corp.’s RAV4 SUV. And Clarke is convinced that will lure both SUV buyers and truck buyers and ultimately fend off the Chinese when they eventually arrive in America.

The concept is moving closer to reality as Ford has begun building hundreds of prototypes of its electric pickup in Dearborn, while overhauling its former SUV factory in Kentucky to begin building the plug-in pickup in 2027.

It is an almost comical understatement to say Ford’s modestly sized and modestly priced electric pickup will launch into an uncertain environment. EVs have become political lightning rods, but they’ve also become a measure of the American auto industry’s global fitness.

China now leads the world in EV design and battery technology — no less than Ford CEO Jim Farley has said so, repeatedly. For now, China’s high-tech, low-cost EVs are kept out of the U.S. market by formidable trade barriers. But they’re taking the rest of the world by storm, including in Mexico and coming soon in Canada.

Clarke contends his EV project could be a bulwark against the competitive tsunami that’s cresting. He believes the electric vehicles his team are developing can be compelling enough to overcome the politics and the competition. The pickup will be just the start, he says. It will be followed by multiple models, including potentially a three-row sport-utility vehicle, a van, a small car and a family sedan.

“A platform has to outlive multiple presidential administrations, multiple changes in tariffs and it has to be agile enough,” Clarke said, “to adapt to whatever the market conditions are at any given time.”

That includes jumping into the nascent robotaxi market that Tesla and Alphabet Inc.’s Waymo are racing to develop in the U.S. Clarke said the UEV platform has the technological capabilities to be semi-autonomous. If it didn’t, he said, the company would be making a big mistake.