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How do you design a $30k electric pickup? Inside Ford's skunkworks
- Innittech 5mo agoThey designed a $70,000 electric pickup that ended up costing $100,000 not too long ago. You don't see them on the road.
- jayofdoom 5mo agoThey sold >100,000 of them, including one to me. The F-150 Lightnings are coming off lease and are available used now for a reasonable price.
- m463 5mo agoYou don't SEE them on the road, because they look like other F-150s. You see the cybertruck, because you can't help it. Meanwhile the F-150 lightning outsold the cybertruck.
- thebruce87m 5mo agoIn the UK EVs have a green rectangle on the number plate. I personally think this is helping adoption as it changes the mindset of people who have been programmed to think that “nobody wants EVs” - it’s hard to argue with the sheer number of them driving around now that you might otherwise miss since a lot of them just look like the ICE equivalents.
- Schiendelman 5mo agoHonestly, most of the F150s I see on the road in the Pacific Northwest are Lightnings. I just glanced up from my laptop and see one now.
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- iNerdier 5mo agoWho says you need Ford to do it? Aging Wheels tried a prototype of a small electric pickup a year ago from a team making one without the support of a huge car company. I have no dog in this fight, other than wanting more of transport to go electric but if Americans refuse to buy vans which probably make more sense for transporting goods this might be a good option. Video: https://youtu.be/1OgN_qctcGs https://youtu.be/1OgN_qctcGs
- Cthulhu_ 5mo agoYou don't need Ford per se, but you do need an experienced manufacturer to take a concept car to mass production, and you need mass production to make something affordable.
- mft_ 5mo agoI'm watching Slate [0] with interest; they aren't following a path according to your assumptions. [0] https://www.slate.auto/en https://www.slate.auto/en
- tomrod 5mo agoThey have financial capital via Bezos, I thought? Not denigrating them whatsoever, I would like to have one.
- mft_ 5mo agoYes; but they don't (AFAIK) have a track record or pre-existing facilities for car design or manufacturing, per the comment I was replying to.
- Cthulhu_ 5mo agoWould be interesting to follow, but as of now they look to be in a startup phase still. Car companies take years to establish themselves. This one seems close though, they say they will do their first deliveries later this year.
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- jf 5mo agoSlate seems closer to shipping a ~$30k electric pickup: https://www.slate.auto https://www.slate.auto
- Markoff 5mo agoI will believe when I see it, until then it's just vaporware, let's see the price if they ship at all by the end of 2026/beginning 2027 maybe.
- kotaKat 5mo agoWe'll know the price in two more weeks. I'm yolo'ing it and I can't wait for my little orange-wrapped pickup. So far their manufacturing and progress videos are quite impressive. The fact there's 25-50+ basically production-ready prototypes if not more now driving around their factory and doing testing compared to most of the other vaporware companies out there has me holding out strong. (How many Elios are out there doing testing? How many TELOs? Oof.)
- Markoff 5mo agoproducing 25-50 prototypes and launching mass production are two very different things edit: just for the record I am their fan and wishing them well, but I am too old for fairy tales unless the product is in market
- kotaKat 5mo agoI meaaaaan... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QF_qGEzm0JA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QF_qGEzm0JA - definitely a lot further than either of those ;)
- Grombobulous 5mo agoI think Slate can get it shipped, that won’t be the issue. The issue is that Slate has completely underestimated customer preference for four door vehicles. Two door vehicle variants have absolutely died off in the market and I’d say with good reason. Find a two door Jeep Wrangler. You’ll find 20-30 four door jeeps before you find a two door. Can you even imagine in 2026 the idea of an Accord Coupe, a Camry Solara, Volkswagen Eos/Cabriolet, Ford Explorer/Bronco 2-door, Civic Coupe, Ford ZX2, Chevy Cavalier 2-door, the list just goes on and on. Back in the day chopping off two doors was a semi-legitimate way to get a barebones base model or I guess look cooler or something. Honestly, I don’t understand how the practicality trade-off ever made sense. Maybe in the days before heavily automated assembly lines, two door vehicles were legitimately cheaper to make?
- da_chicken 5mo agoKelly's 14 points are still a great read and should resonate with a lot of people here. That said, when they tried this in the past they did it by changing the sticker price to $65k+. So, color me skeptical.
- wongarsu 5mo agoThe list of 14 rules for running a skunkworks program and how they apply here is great and well worth reading the article, regardless of how you feel about the likelihood of Ford ever successfully executing on a $30k ev truck
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- WorldMaker 5mo agoI think Ford is technically capable of building a $30k EV truck and have been for some time. The F-150 Lightning was surprisingly close and only the overshot the mark in the direction most of the rest of the F-150 line has leaned in the same years. I think Ford still hasn't solved its Dealer Problem that it currently would not have dealers willing to sell a $30k EV truck in the US.
- pilotneko 5mo agoWhere did you see a F-150 Lightning new for less than $40k anywhere?
- WorldMaker 5mo agoI didn't, I said that $40k is closer to $30k than many would give it credit and that I believe that at least $10k-$20k more expensive than necessary for "luxury trim reasons" seems to be the current F-150 brand.
- collabs 5mo agoWhat stops Ford or General Motors from creating a "startup" that is not bound by its existing agreements with its dealership network to sell a new vehicle direct to consumers "in select states" where the law allows this? I mean any state where the Tesla is sold should allow this, right?
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- vsgherzi 5mo agoThe US is concerned about Chinese EVs taking over the market. For good reason they’re not happy bad and they’re extremely cheap. I’m no economist nor moralist so I can’t say if banning Chinese evs are the right move or not but I can understand the US wanting to try to create its own market before getting destroyed by the competitor. I don’t think it’s fair to say that speaks to the quality of the US alternatives. There’s plenty of smart people trying to put this together to create affordable domestic electric cars. Personally I applaud that and am happy that competition is getting legacy auto manufacturers to finally make some interesting cars.
- GreenSalem 5mo ago[flagged]
- verve_rat 5mo agoYou know China is busy genociding its Uyghurs population, right? Their cars are probably better than US ones, but they are not free of the taint of genocide. Edit: and that's not counting their aggressive territorial expansion in the South China Sea and their threats against Taiwan.
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- kaon_2 5mo agoI don't want to come across as the China pisser because most big countries do scumbag things of have done them (cough colonialism). But some more of China's vices that are out of sight: - Keep the war going in Myanmar with terrible results for the population of one of the biggest and most populous countries in the world. You just don't hear about it because no journalist goes there. - Keeping North Korea in the saddle whereas they could have gently pushed for improvements. - Keeping the war in Ukraine going. If Chinese leadership has any moral ambition, they could stop the war quickly. But they don't. Their own agenda comes first, as is the case with any superpower. But yes man I would buy a BYD immediatey and it pisses me off to no end that hey are 5x more expensive in Europe than in China. I guess the whole morality of free trade was only 'good' as long as it benefited us.
- brikym 5mo ago#15 Don't tell anyone about it.
- voxadam 5mo agoKelly's 15th rule was actually "Starve before doing business with the damned Navy. They don't know what the hell they want and will drive you up a wall before they break either your heart or a more exposed part of your anatomy."
- kotaKat 5mo agoCan't wait for Ford's $40,000 electric pickup. Pepperidge Farm remembers the $19,995 MSRP Ford Maverick with its standard hybrid drivetrain. Missed my chance to buy one, watched the price bloat out and nope.
- Grombobulous 5mo agoTo be fair to Ford, the Maverick launched in 2022 right before a period of accelerated inflation, especially in the car industry. You’d be hard pressed to find any new vehicle that hasn’t seen a significant price increase since that time. It’s still a truck you can get for $26k-28k and is only about $3k more than the cheapest cars sold in America. I think your sentiment is an understandable bit of cynicism around EVs, and one that US consumers have felt for a while. It seems like the whole concept of the EV is dead. Nobody wants it, carmakers are pulling back. Meanwhile, EVs are exploding in popularity and value basically all the other markets outside of the United States. In my opinion, the idea that a good and affordable EV product will not become mainstream is sticking around because American car buyers have been starved of new EV models due to a market of weak demand and revoked incentives. This is going to change soon, and this change will hit the consumer market relatively suddenly. A lot of the cost challenges with EVs have evaporated. In other words, yeah, Ford is easily going to make a $30,000 EV pickup. I totally believe it. Remember when Toyota said they’re done bothering with EVs? Then all of a sudden the 2026 bz refresh is a legit EV, and now the new Lexus ES is launching with the EV model being the highest performance and cheapest model. The Rivian R2 is yet another huge deal about to launch on the premium side of the market. I’d have a hard time figuring out why what I would choose something like a gasoline BMW X3 over the R2 - they’re pretty much in the same price range. In other words, the era of EVs costing $10-20k more than an equivalent gasoline car is abruptly ending.
- gyulai 5mo agoI live in Germany and am sure as hell that I will never be driving a $30k electric pickup here. They'll make sure nothing like this ever becomes legal to import or drive on German roads until after there's a German car brand on it, and it costs 10x that while being identical, just to subsidize lots of local jobs that are low-wage, high-tax, and taking away manpower from other sectors/fields where it's more needed.
- snowpid 5mo agovw offers a electro pickup for 36k excluding tax (43k EUR with tax, ). https://www.volkswagen-nutzfahrzeuge.de/de/modelle/transporter.html https://www.volkswagen-nutzfahrzeuge.de/de/modelle/transport... Its less than 10x
- cheschire 5mo agoI mean, you can see how a kastenwagen nutzfahrzeug is a very different vehicle from a consumer mid-size pickup, right? Sure, technically some would call the vehicle you linked a pickup, and technically German law still identifies the consumer pickup truck as a nutzfahrzeug instead of a PKW, but it doesn’t feel like you’re making a best effort to meet GP in the middle.
- gyulai 5mo agoThe distinction gets at something interesting though, and it's a weird intermingling of culture and politics. I think a truck as owned by a consumer, and as an American would understand the word, is, at least in part, a lifestyle statement derived from maybe overprovisioning on the horsepower. Such a lifestyle statement in Germany seems to be perfectly socially acceptable when it ties in with luxury and doing your "civic duty" by buying German, but it clearly ruffles feathers and meets with political headwind when it ties in with the culture and financial constraint of the "commoner".
- cheschire 5mo agoIn my experience the resistance seems to come from the sense of “waste” that comes from buying a specialized vehicle. Anecdotally the folks I talk to (all blue-collar “commoners”) are overly focused on buying the eierlegende Wollmilchsau[0] vehicle. They view specialized vehicles, especially luxury-priced specialized vehicles, as an unnecessary waste. Does this relate with your experience? It sounds like your perspective is broader than mine and more informed. Edit: oof two downvotes for trying to have a conversation and expand my understanding of a culture. Vielen dank. 0: definition for the English speakers: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/eierlegende_Wollmilchsau https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/eierlegende_Wollmilchsau
- leethargo 5mo agoFrom the title, I expected this to be about electric guitars :-(
- TomMasz 5mo agoI've worked on skunkworks projects. It's all fine and dandy until it becomes a product and the main company takes over.
- xtiansimon 5mo agoMeh. I want that IMV Origin from Toyota https://www.core77.com/posts/139132/Toyotas-Brilliant-Plan-to-Sell-Unfinished-Cars https://www.core77.com/posts/139132/Toyotas-Brilliant-Plan-t...
- dyauspitr 5mo agoI liked Fords erev plan for a brief moment before China destroyed that with 1 MW charging. There is zero need for gas in a world when you can go from 20-80% in 3 mins.
- newtonianrules 5mo agoSimple. You strip out all the bullshit and don’t put a 100 kWh battery into it. There, I’ll await my check.
- Jblx2 5mo agoAnyone have semi-reliable data on the volume price for lithium ion cells in mid-2026? (or packs if that data is easier to come by).
- Schiendelman 5mo agoThe batteries are less and less of an issue now - that battery would now be less than $10,000.
- testing22321 5mo agoStructural battery pack with seats bolted to it. 48 volt, less wiring, castings front and rear. Focus on less parts, ease of manufacturing and aerodynamics. Makes sense with so many ex-Tesla people there. Looks like ford will only be ~5 years behind if they can pull it off
- liampulles 5mo agoThe original Skunkworks optimizes for a low production volume of vehicles which operate in a very extreme band of performance. And yes these projects are able to deliver within budget, but they are still very expensive machines. This is totally opposite to what is applicable to Ford, where really the innovation needs to be in the factory. The other key lesson from the Skunkworks book, which is applicable, is that to the greatest degree possible, one should not reinvent the wheel. Reuse parts from other high production vehicles, which have proven their reliability. Focus the innovation tactically.