Ford Expands EV Skunkworks

[mackinaw]

From today's Autoline Daily:

 

Next Monday Ford is going to share a lot more information about its low cost EV that’s coming out of its skunkworks program in California. Ford calls it the Model T of EVs and claims it’s going to be cost competitive with Chinese electric vehicles. The skunkworks team, which operates separately from Ford’s legacy operations, developed a new EV platform which will accommodate several different body styles, or top hats to use the industry jargon. The first one will be a smallish pickup truck that will be made at Ford’s Louisville plant in Kentucky. Very importantly, the skunkworks program is not a one-off effort. Ford is moving the team into a new 2-building campus with 250,000 square-feet, a new design studio, including a VR room, a milling and fabrication shop, and new test labs. That tells us that the EVDC, or Electric Vehicle Development Center, as it’s officially known, is going to be working on a lot more future EV projects.

 

[akirby]

And this is how you change 100+ years of legacy thinking and processes.  Bring in outside people and start over.

 

This is why I think they’ll succeed and why it won’t be business as usual.

[morgan20]

Here are photos of Ford EVDC. I also put them in the Ford will reveal CE1 products on August 11 section:

 

 

 

 

 

[jpd80]

Eyes have been opened…

The CE1 was developed at roughly 30% of the cost of doing it via Ford’s own engineering.

This has to be a major shift in thinking and signals big changes coming for the rest of Ford’s

engineering development strategy. Modern vehicle development has become just so expensive 

and tied down to supplier based control modules for most things…a big shift away is coming.