Well, there is no shrinkage in EV sales. It's not growing as fast... we are still on track to sell more EV year over year.   Basically, Ford is pivoting away to lithium phosphate battery using CATL technology (Michigan Blueoval). SK Blueoval Tennessee was a lithium ion battery joint venture and Ford probably doesn't see any need for that much lithium ion production anymore.   CE platform uses CATL lithium phosphate battery technology and we know Farley is favoring CE.    The mothballed GE platform and the fate unknown TE F-150 platform use SK lithium ion battery technology.    Ford keeping the Kentucky plant could mean it will keep producing lithium ion there for legacy EV and hybrid products that uses that battery. Or it could mean that it will implement another lithium phosphate production line without SK which presumably would not like it if it still owns the plant.

European van market basically has 4 major players:   Ford/VW Mercedes (which used to have alliance with Renault but now goes alone) Stellantis/Toyota Renault/Nissan   And then you have the minor players like SAIC and Hyundai.   Not sure exactly how Ford will work with Renault now but they are still tied at the hip to VW. Unless of course Ford and VW are headed for a breakup that we don't know about yet. 

Nice find friend, we've heard a lot of these talking points before, but it's really nice to see just how innovative this team is being. I really liked the quote from Farley about finding the balance of aero and aesthetics for these EVs, that was a concern I had following the three row situation, that they would rely on radical aero, and the way it looked was the way the wind tunnel wanted it to look with no real effort put into the styling. Sounds like that's not gonna be the case with him talking about making something aero efficient that's also "incredibly attractive".    So it's not gonna be this weird Prius shape with a bed 😂. 

The NY Times has an article about Ford Universal Electric Platform and the skunkworks. It's titled Ford’s Car of the Future, Hatched in a Skunk Works Near Los Angeles.    Some excerpts:   In 2021, after Apple gave up on its secretive plans to build a driverless electric car, Doug Field left the technology company to embark on a mission impossible meant to save the American auto industry.   He rejoined Ford Motor, where he had started his career decades earlier, with the grand ambition of designing electric vehicles that would allow the century-old company to compete with Chinese carmakers, whose vehicles are hugely popular with consumers and breaking global sales records.   Mr. Field knew the old ways of Detroit wouldn’t do. Time was short, and to jolt the storied automaker into action he created an automotive start-up of sorts — a secretive lab near Los Angeles, with a satellite office in the heart of Silicon Valley, that he called a “skunk works.”   He recruited engineers and designers from electric vehicle makers like Tesla, Rivian and Lucid and from start-ups working on batteries, electronics and software, and promised them the kind of creative freedom that tech workers take for granted.   To shield his project from corporate meddling, anyone not on Mr. Field’s select team wasn’t even allowed through the door. No exceptions.   The best hope is to leapfrog the Chinese by producing better batteries, more efficient electric motors and other breakthroughs and then doing it again and again. And the best hope for making those things happen are people like Mr. Field, who are trying to teach Detroit to be as innovative as Silicon Valley. “I knew it would be a completely different challenge than anything I’d done before,” he said, “which was to try and change the course of a large organization.”   Mr. Field’s task now, he said, is to meld Ford’s century of manufacturing experience with this kind of inventiveness. As the vehicle [CE1] moves closer to production, he has been allowing more people to cross the skunk works’ moat. The team now has a satellite office in Dearborn, Mich., Ford’s hometown.   “Getting a large company to be able to still produce high volume and high quality, and be able to innovate,” he said, “that would be a force to be reckoned with.”

I think the concept they released after the production model looks much better. It fixed a lot of the complaints. This is a design that really only looks good jacked up with beefy tires.with that said, the design we see on the seltos and ev9 would definitely look better.

To get the most accurate answer you have to see the cargo/loading sticker on the actual truck.  Anything less is just guessing.     For the 5th wheel the tongue weight is realistically 22% of the trailer GVWR, so in this case; 2,766 lbs. so add that to your other weights (1,300 + 2,766= 4,066 lbs.). So on paper, the truck isn’t suitable, but again we are guessing at the actual truck numbers.  

FCA dropped the Renault based vans once they merged with PSA to form Stellantis.    The only rebadges Renault now has are with Nissan. 

Yeah, I don't know what they were thinking with that Tasman.   It makes me think of one of those Angry Birds green pigs.

It's one of those designs that makes you question how that person even got hired as a designer in the first place. If Kia had given it the same front end as the telluride, with flared fenders and rugged off-road tires, it would have been a great looking pickup. 

Yes and Kia could have picked any of those front end styles for the Tasman pickup but instead went with the most excruciatingly awful fronts you will ever see. Buyers are running away from the sight of it.