I first thought Ford CEO Jim Farley was briefing me on a new car. It turned out to be something altogether more ambitious: a completely new way to make a car. Or, more precisely, electric vehicles.
“We build the whole middle, front, and rear separately—and then, at the end, we put them together,” says Farley. “No one’s ever built a car that way.”
That approach stands in stark contrast to the usual way cars are made: pieced together bit by bit on a linear production line, one at a time, with engineers contorting themselves into tight spaces workstation after workstation.
Splitting the EV into three complete parts is potentially game-changing in terms of both speed and cost. In Ford’s new system, an assembly line becomes an “assembly tree,” where instead of one long conveyor, three sub-assemblies run their own lines simultaneously, then join together. Because you have three smaller sections rather than an entire car to work on, it’s possible to make large single-piece aluminum unicastings each for the front, middle, and rear, replacing dozens of smaller parts.
“Why do you want to build the car that way? Because the operator can build the car inside the car,” says Farley. “That’s not how it works today. You have all these armatures and things to put in like instrument panels. Plus, there’s no need for line-side parts, right? The parts go in the car as it’s being built.”
Ford calls its new way of making EVs the “Ford Universal EV Production System,” and will spend $2 billion to set it up at the company’s Louisville assembly plant. Ford says the new method will be 40 percent faster than the existing process there, and have a comparable reduction in workstations. Parts needed to make Ford’s new EVs will be cut by 20 percent.
“It has 30 percent less fasteners,” says Farley, referring to the bolts, nuts, screws, rivets, clips, and clamps used to put vehicles together securely. The wiring harness in a coming midsize truck will be nearly a mile (1.3 km) shorter and 10 kilograms lighter. The savings go on.
A new way of making cars necessitates new car designs. That’s where the “Ford Universal EV Platform” comes in: a brand-new 400-volt architecture that uses this Duplo-style, three-part assembly. The scalable, modular system can be adapted to make a variety of EV shapes and sizes from B-segment cars to vans and three-row SUVs. And the mid section will use Ford-made lithium iron phosphate (LFP) prismatic batteries that are cheaper and safer as the structural vehicle floor. That LFP battery, the kind favored in China, is 30 percent cheaper than a lithium battery.
The first vehicle from the Ford Universal EV Platform will come in 2027, a midsize four-door electric pickup with an impressively low targeted starting price of $30,000. Ford says it will be as fast as a Mustang EcoBoost, and have more passenger space than the current Toyota RAV4.
Doug Field, Ford’s chief EV, digital, and design officer, who formerly ran Apple‘s car program and led the development of the Model 3 at Tesla, has been marshaling Ford’s in-house skunkworks team secretly developing this project.
“We build a structural battery out of the cells, and that is the floor of the vehicle. So we actually built the seats on it,” says Field. So, to be clear, there’s no frame or structure with a battery on top of it to which the seats are bolted—with Ford’s new model the battery is the structure. How does this differ from existing cell-to-chassis or cell-to-pack technology? “This is cell-to-body,” says Field, adding that making this all work was very, very hard.
“There’s no single magic breakthrough. It’s just really, really hard engineering,” he says. “And there’s a whole bunch of problems to be solved. Like, now you have this body that has no floor, how do you keep it from bending as it goes down the line? How do you deal with the paint when you’ve painted the back half, but you haven’t painted the front half, and then you’re going to bolt them together at the end?”
“We knew we wanted to build EVs differently, and we decided how we wanted to build them—then we got a huge set of engineering problems we had to go solve to make that work.” The worst of these problems? “Joining the front end. Sealing, crash [strength], corrosion, dimensional accuracy—all of those things, doing those at the end is … that front end joint is definitely the most difficult.”
Yes, much of this is catching up with state-of-the-art stuff for EVs, such as zonal architecture where different functions are controlled in different parts of the car, which you can already see in the new Tesla Model Y and many China EVs. Similarly, large aluminum castings are already being used by Tesla and Chinese makers.
However, if Ford has genuinely managed to build a car in three distinct modules, which are completed fully and only then bolted together, that is a genuine first. Yes, Tesla talked about doing something like this back in 2023 with its “unboxed” EV manufacturing process, but it hasn’t done it yet. In other words, Ford may have beaten Tesla to the punch here. The old dinosaur has turned into quite the velociraptor.
Almost as impressive as Ford’s new modular manufacturing is the number of people and sheer speed with which the company has achieved this undeniable win. “What’s really interesting is the size of the team [the skunkworks had] compared to what if Ford had to do this,” says Farley. “If we forced [Ford] do it, it would have taken five times the people.”
“When we agreed to start the program, three years ago, we hired Alan Clarke. He went into a building, and it was one person. That’s how the project started,” says Field. Alan Clarke worked for Field at Tesla, where he helped create the Model 3, worked on the Y, the Cybertruck, and more. “There’s people in China now who probably have passed him, but at the time he had architected more electric vehicles than anybody in the world, so he was absolutely the right person to tap. And he’s also a talent magnet. He’s built the team really quickly—a world-class team. A lot of people who are super excited to move from a Rivian or a Tesla and build something for Ford.”
Farley thinks that Ford’s new way of making EVs is the perfect weapon to take on the Chinese automakers, the ideal example of precisely how the West needs to compete. “You’ve got the BYD model: 700,000 employees, 200,000 powertrain engineers. How do you beat them?” asks Farley.
“Turns out, Doug and Alan and the team built a propulsion system that was like Apollo 13, managed down to the watt so that our battery could be so much smaller than BYD’s. Their cost advantage on vertical integration on the battery is offset by innovation in the powertrain. We can’t beat them on scale. We can’t beat them on vertical integration. But we can beat them on innovation.”
