Ford turns to F1 and bounties to build a $30,000 electric truck

Ford says it will deliver an electric truck next year that starts at $30,000 and can compete with Chinese automakers without sacrificing profit margins. The company claims a mix of 3D-printed, Lego-like components, Formula 1-style engineering thinking, and an internal bounty program will help it hit that goal, according to comments shared Tuesday.

It will need to. Ford took a $19.5 billion hit in December and ended production of its battery-electric F-150 Lightning. The company can't afford for this new EV strategy to fail.

Ford's push toward an affordable EV lineup started several years ago inside a skunkworks effort led by Alan Clarke, a 12-year Tesla veteran. Elements of the plan became public last August, when Ford said it would abandon its traditional moving assembly line and invest $2 billion in its Louisville factory to implement a new production system that it said could speed manufacturing by 15%.

At the time, Ford said its new EVs would be built on a universal platform using single-piece aluminium unicastings — large cast components designed to eliminate parts and enable faster assembly — along with lithium-iron-phosphate batteries licensed from China's CATL.

Now Ford is offering more details in a wave of blog posts and social media updates describing how it plans to deliver an EV truck, which it says will be appealing, priced about $20,000 below the average new vehicle, and still profitable. Ford did not provide key specs such as range, features, or charging times. But it did outline its plan to build lighter, cheaper, and more efficient EVs with fewer parts.

The effort begins with what Ford calls its universal EV platform, or UEV. Clarke says the platform will support a mid-sized truck first and could later underpin a sedan, a crossover, a three-row SUV, and even small commercial vans. The UEV is Ford's first "clean sheet" EV platform designed from the ground up — a meaningful shift for a company that built the Mustang Mach-E and F-150 Lightning EVs using existing infrastructure and manufacturing processes.

"It's a platform that is built around efficiency," Clarke said during a media briefing. "It's built around affordability to be able to make long-range electric vehicle travel affordable to more people."

To get there, Clarke said he aimed to build a new culture seeded with talent from Formula 1 and companies including Apple, Lucid Motors, Rivian, Aesla, aandAuto Motive Power, a startup Ford acquired in 2023. The effort includes about 450 people based in Long Beach, California, and another 200 in a Palo Alto office. Clarke also said the team introduced a bounty program to help engineers see how daily decisions translate into the customer experience and the final vehicle.

The bounty program was centred on efficiency. The team assigned numerical targets to every aspect of the UEV, including overall vehicle mass, aerodynamic drag, and even individual components. In practice, that meant Ford might choose a more expensive part if it reduced the EV's weight — improving efficiency and long-term cost effectiveness.

"We've been very focused on making sure that the cost that we're moving from the product doesn't remove value," Clarke said. One example he gave was that even the base version of the EV truck will include a power-folding mirror — typically a premium feature — because it reduces aerodynamic drag. Ford reduced costs by using one motor instead of two to handle mirror adjustment and folding.

That efficiency obsession also involved a group of former Formula 1 engineers who worked closely with Ford's design team. Ford claims the result is a mid-sized EV truck that is 15% more aerodynamically efficient than any other pickup on the market today.

Those ex-F1 engineers used 3D-printed and machined parts to build a Lego-like testing vehicle. Thousands of 3D-printed components — accurate to within fractions of a millimetre compared with Ford's simulations and swappable in minutes — were used to evaluate aerodynamics. These modular prototypes were used early and often in wind tunnel testing, unlike Ford's traditional approach of waiting until the design was nearly finished before running extensive aerodynamic testing.

A major focus was the battery, which can represent around 40% of a vehicle's total cost. A lighter, more efficient vehicle allows Ford to use a smaller battery pack, lowering overall expense. Clarke said the result will be an EV truck with roughly 15% more range — or about 50 miles — than a comparable gas-powered pickup.

The efficiency drive also pushed the team to adopt manufacturing approaches popularised by Tesla, including aluminium unicastings and a shift from a 12-volt system to a 48-volt electrical architecture for some functions.

Ford also redesigned the UEV's electrical and software architecture around a zonal approach, similar to those of Tesla and Rivian. Instead of distributing dozens of electronic control units (ECUs) throughout the vehicle, Ford consolidated functions into five main modules. This reduces complexity, cuts cost, lowers copper usage, and helps shorten the wire harness by 4,000 feet while reducing its weight by 22 pounds compared with one of Ford's first-generation EVs, according to Luccas Di Tullio, a Ford software engineer who previously worked at Auto Motive Power.

Di Tullio said Ford applied the same principles to power electronics, finding ways to share components and reduce part counts with a single module that handles power distribution and battery management, while also providing AC power back to a customer's home during an outage.

Clarke also said Ford developed its own software for the five main ECUs, down to the application layer. Because Ford owns the software at the deepest levels, he said, it becomes highly portable across vehicles.

"Other than being able to control the infotainment, what shows up on the screens, [and] how you interact with the vehicle, all of the body controls then are directly coupled," he said. "So you can imagine that many of the experiences that can only be created by coupling all the different sensors around the vehicle are now at our fingertips and under our own control."