It’s also hard when brands like BYD actually design and make batteries and the vehicles are just one of several ways to sell those batteries. That completely flips the manufacturing and sales paradigm. Also, they are roughly a full generation ahead of anything planned by North American based brands.

There were accusations that Japan Inc was doing similar to that but in a more subtle way, currency manipulation?   In any regard, it’s been interesting watching the Chinese government run the equivalent of of BEV Hunger Games where the fittest survive….thee s so much government control in China, non-domestic brands are withering away.

I thought I said that but you defined it much better. So sad that Ford’s engineering could not look beyond its own rules, makes me wonder what could have been with Lightning, Mach E and 3 - row Utility, the latter would have rivalled Tesla X with the right engineering….   Open box engineering is exciting, let’s see how far Ford can take those giant flash castings, if they get the body shop sped up to the same pace as the final trim line, look out…

Yippee for Rivian!  They lost another 907 million dollars in the 3rd quarter!  Keep up the good work!  

It was to keep Ford's legacy design, engineering and marketing biases out of the picture.  That's why he brought in all the outsiders and it paid off big time.

Maybe R2 is Rivian's Model T Moment after all...   The cat’s out of the bag. The Rivian R2 is good, and customers know it. In fact, they’re so in the know that the R2 is outselling the R1T and R1S combined, the company confirmed during its third-quarter earnings call. Along with outselling the other customer-focused products, the R2 is also outselling Rivian’s EDV delivery vans.   Rivian says the R2’s strong showing means the company is able to increase its yearly sales projections to between 67,000 and 70,000 vehicles; the previous projection was for 65,000. When the more affordable trims do arrive, those sales figures could increase even more.

From what I can figure, the timing of the CE1 project came right after Lightning’s +200,000 reservations evaporated. I sense that Farley knew then that the existing strategy of large BEVs was not attracting enough interest.   The reason for the secrecy at the time was obviously not to harm Lightning or Mach E or the coming 3 row suv  but also I suspect it was to stop interference from the Ford Electrification team trying to control the project, the fact that their key cards were locked out of the skunkworks is another big tell.   Random thought, Lightning’s perimeter frame around the battery pack reminds me of the Panther frame, could you imagine the ridiculous image of Crown Victorias and Lincoln Town Cars built as big ass BEVs with front and rear motor drives….

The fact that he kept it secret and didn't allow any interaction with legacy Ford folks at corporate says everything.

As a former Ford plant employee I have the "big shot bullshit detector" turned on at all times. 😄    In the case of the skunkworks though, everything you stated is right on the money. Jimbo really does deserve credit for that, and for changing the corpo culture at Ford for the better. It seems that at least some of the big shots have finally embraced long-term, strategic thinking in how they do their jobs at FoMoCo. That's much more important than any quarterly results.     

Farley gets all the credit for starting the skunkworks team, filling it with outsiders and applying their findings across the company.