A secret team of Ford engineers has been working for two years on a new platform for affordable electric cars, company CEO Jim Farley has revealed.
Speaking as the company released its fourth-quarter financial results for 2023, Farley said the company is “adjusting our capital [investment], switching more focus onto smaller EV products”.
He added: “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 start-up.
“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 [Ford] Pro.”
Ford Pro is the company’s stand-alone commercial vehicle division, responsible for models such as the Transit and F-150.
Investment in higher-volume, lower-cost electric cars – likely destined to serve as indirect successors to the Fiesta and Focus – comes in response to Ford’s finding that most buyers are unwilling to pay over the odds to go electric.
Farley added that the availability of cheap credit pre-Covid and the pent-up demand for cars amid the semiconductor chip crisis, as well as the rapid rise in early adopters of EVs, “gave us too optimistic a demand signal”.
This drove a “temporary spike in supply” and Ford struggled to find buyers for the cars it had built as it realised that – after the early EV adopters were on board – mainstream buyers were not prepared to pay a premium to go electric.
“As the Covid shock retreated, we learned that as you scale EVs to 5000-7000 units a month and you move into the [majority of customers], they are not willing to pay a significant premium for EVs,” said Farley.
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