The Next Leap I Ford Electric Vehicles
This was not easy at all. We’re fighting a battle globally that is ultimately testing our capability. It’s really not about chasing a singular magical secret. Change is is necessary. The mission is to design, develop, architect a new EV platform to build affordable vehicles for Ford Motor Company. We had involvement with both product and manufacturing. Bring us together to optimize every system, every component, every part with this one end goal. And that’s the motivation that drives everyone. Back’s against the wall and you got to make it happen. and it became very clear that there’s no silver bullet really. That’s kind of where we started to figure out, hey, maybe we could actually build the vehicle differently. Traditionally, all the way back to the Model T, vehicles are built on an assembly line. It’s one straight line and you just bring all the parts to the car and the line continues to move. been around assembly lines for 21 years and they’re built the exact same way and the same problems are always there. Um, for me, wiring is always this nemesis and if you don’t change that input, then nothing else is ever going to change. There were tons of doubts teams would come back and say, “Well, you’re going to fail here, you’re going to fail there, you’re going to fail here.” We came up with the Ford universal EV production system. So it’s more of a tree formation. So breaking up the vehicle into three different subasssembly lines in parallel. And what that’s actually doing is shrinking the overall time to go from start to finish with fewer stations and coming together seamlessly. And because of those modular sections, there’s no obstruction. You have now full access where typically we would be reaching in through the door, twist, turn in order to install parts, now everything is right in front of you. Uniccastings are very important to this architecture. We can have one large casting as one process, saving time, weight, and cost. This gives you a once- in a generation opportunity to architect an entirely new platform with an entirely new powertrain and lower cost for our customer. It saw this as more than an experiment. They saw it as an opportunity to make their mark in automotive. The biggest factor that affects the cost of an electric vehicle is batteries. But reducing the size of the battery makes its way into every other part of the vehicle and allows us to make a lot of cost gains. We are going to use lithium ion phosphate batteries. They are cobalt and nickel free. It also serves as the floor which means better ride isolation from road noise, better handling. This really allows for a much better fun to drive experience for the customer. The battery, the drive units and everything are so much smaller that for the same size outside you actually get more space on the inside of the vehicle. You can put the powertrain in the front or the back. So as a result, we could give the customer more leg room, more headroom, and ultimately makes a better vehicle. Developing this affordable EV architecture has been the biggest challenge of my career, but also give us the profound opportunity to really set Ford up for success in the next 120 years.
The mission was to develop a new platform to build affordable electric vehicles for everyone. This is our bold vision for the future of electric vehicle assembly. Learn more about the Ford Universal EV Platform from the engineers who developed it.
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