The new platform was developed by a dedicated “skunkworks” team, which operates independently from Ford’s main business. As noted by Farley, there has been a seismic change in the EV sector during the latter half of 2023, and it was driven in part by a combination of EV manufacturers cutting their price by 20% and lots of capital and capacity being poured into the two-row crossover segment. Amidst this change, Ford will be stepping up with its Gen 2 electric vehicles.
Farley described the project as follows. “We’re going to spend less capital on larger EVs. And as we’ve always said, we’ll have a very small number of those.
We’re going to focus those large EVs on geographies and product segments where we have a dominant advantage like trucks and vans. And those products will have breakthrough efficiency compared to our Gen 1 products, and they’re going to be packed with innovations that customers are going to be excited to pay for. “We’re also adjusting our capital switching more focused on to smaller EV products.
Now, this is important because we made a bet in silence two years ago. We developed a super-talented skunkworks team to create a low-cost EV platform. It was a small group, small team, some of the best EV engineers in the world, and it was separate from the Ford mothership.
It was a startup. And they’ve developed a flexible platform that will not only deploy to several types of vehicles but will be a large installed base for software and services that we’re now seeing at Pro,” Farley said. *Don’t hesitate to contact us with news tips.