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.

No order guide but the build and price for 2026 is live now

The reason they were less expensive to maintain was they didn't change and the mechanics knew the ins and outs of keeping them running. If your supporting the same vehicle for almost 20 years, you should know the ins and out of how it is supposed to run.