A Secret Team Within Ford Has Been Building a $30K EV

Ford is quietly trying to reinvent how cars are built in the US—and it's hanging that bet on a $30,000 electric pickup. In a deeply reported piece for the Wall Street Journal, Sharon Terlep details a secret "skunk works" effort started in 2022 that's tasked with building a midsize EV truck that can match Chinese rivals on cost and performance. For the first two years, they "worked in near-total isolation from offices in Irvine, Calif.," writes Terlep. With a target 2027 launch, the team is now coming out of the shadows.

To get there, Ford has ripped up its own playbook. The team—stacked with Tesla and Apple veterans and handpicked Ford iconoclasts—is ditching long-standing rules, cutting hundreds of parts and thousands of feet of wiring, and replacing the traditional assembly line with a so-called assembly tree, described by Terlep as "a modular system [that] stamps out two massive, aluminum castings and a battery that get merged at the end of the process." That's more in line with how Tesla and Chinese automakers build. The team has built about 30 prototypes by hand in order to surface issues. A Louisville, Ky., factory that once made gas-powered SUVs is being converted to produce the new EV. Read the full story for more.