Credit: Ford

The electric car transition isn’t going great for America’s domestic automakers, but it’s far from over. Ford may have ended production of the full-size F-150 Lightning pickup truck, but next year, it will debut a new “Universal EV Platform,” beginning with a midsize truck that it says will start at a much more reasonable $30,000, should all go to plan. The company seems serious about the idea, having created an internal “skunkworks” several years ago to design this new affordable platform from first principles.

Doing more with less is the key: fewer components and using less energy to go the same distance. Now, the company has given us a clearer picture of how it plans to make that happen.

A few years ago, Ford and its crosstown rival bet that full-size pickup truck customers would be wowed enough by instant torque and minuscule running costs to overlook how towing heavily diminished range. They created electric versions of their best-selling behemoths, packed with clever features like power sockets for job sites and the ability to power a home during an emergency.

Largely, though, truck buyers weren’t willing to overlook those things. People who may have still been interested were put off by sticker shock as supply chain chaos and dealership avarice inflated prices far beyond what was originally expected. Now those bets are unwinding—at a cost to Ford of almost $20 billion.

Smaller, cheaper? We got it.

Meanwhile, Ford appears to have been listening. Instead of making a full-size pickup with a starting price north of $60,000, it’s aiming to produce something more midsized (more interior space than a Toyota RAV4, it says), starting at half that. And it will only succeed if it can get away with using a smaller battery than you’d find between the frame rails of an F-150 Lightning. About 40 percent of the vehicle cost is battery, Ford says.

Underbody aerodynamics are extremely important.
Credit: Ford

We’ve known for some time that the plan included new prismatic lithium iron phosphate cells made in Michigan. The pickup will be assembled at Ford’s Louisville plant with a new, more efficient process that uses 40 percent fewer workstations than a traditional Ford assembly line.

If you want to provide more range with less energy and a smaller battery pack, you need a more efficient vehicle. Too much weight is a bad thing, and at highway speeds, aerodynamic efficiency matters most of all. But designing a new vehicle (or platform) is not simple—it involves many different departments, each with its own priorities.

“For example, the aerodynamics team always wants a lower roof for less aerodynamic drag; the occupant package team wants a higher roof for more headroom, while the interiors team wants to decrease the cabin size to reduce the cost,” said Alan Clarke, executive director of Ford’s advanced EV development. “Usually, these groups negotiate until they find a ‘middle ground,’ one that inevitably ends in a trade-off led by yet another department tasked with making tradeoffs on behalf of the customer.”

To get everyone on the same page, Ford instituted what it calls “bounties” to help engineers evaluate the trade-offs involved in design decisions.

“Now, the aerodynamics team and interior team share the same goal, and both understood that adding even 1 mm to the roof height would mean $1.30 in additional battery cost or .055 miles [0.089 km] of range. With bounties, each team has a common objective to maximize range while decreasing battery cost—a direct linkage to giving our customers more,” Clarke said.

15 percent better efficiency

The wake from the front wheels helps prevent the rear wheels from creating even more drag as they rotate. The underside of the drive units have been aero-optimized, with the driveshafts angled to minimize friction. The traditional pickup truck shape isn’t the ideal starting point for an extremely low-drag vehicle, but Ford has shaped the cab to help airflow continue over the back in a teardrop shape, ignoring the bed, until it meets the top of the tailgate. “To the air, it’s no longer a truck,” said Saleem Merkt, head of aerodynamics for Ford’s advanced EV development.

A prototype illustration of the aerodynamic efficiency of Ford’s mid-size electric truck.
Credit: Ford

Like Merkt, many of the aerodynamicists working on the EV platform have a background in Formula 1, and Ford says it used their “fail fast, learn faster” mentality to good effect. They introduced the wind tunnel early in the truck’s development, using a modular approach that allowed them to swap 3D-printed or machined parts in and out to test new configurations quickly.

“[F]rom under-body shields to front fascia to suspension—in as little as minutes. We tested thousands of 3D-printed components, including versions of the suspension and drive units that didn’t even exist as functional prototypes yet,” Merkt said. “Since these 3D-printed parts were accurate within fractions of a millimeter of our simulations, it allowed us to develop a deeper, data-driven understanding of how every single detail impacts range and efficiency in the real world.”

In addition to the wind-shaping roof, Merkt’s team redesigned the side mirrors to use a single actuator for both adjusting the glass and folding the mirror. “Now that the mirror body no longer needs internal ‘wiggle room’ for the glass to move independently, we were able to shrink the entire housing by over 20 percent. This reduction in frontal area and mass unlocks a more aerodynamic shape, adding an estimated 1.5 miles of range,” Merkt said.

On their own, each small optimization adds only a little more range. Together, though, they add up to a meaningful improvement over any midsize truck on the market, Ford says.

Large castings, fewer wires, smarter electronics

Large castings are a hot trend in the automotive industry right now. As long as you have good quality control, using single castings instead of assemblies made from dozens or hundreds of components can save time and weight. For the 2027 electric pickup, Ford is using just two front and rear structural parts, each a single aluminum casting. For comparison, the Ford Maverick pickup uses 146 structural parts in the front and rear, Ford says. And since unicastings require fewer fasteners and adhesives, Ford needs fewer robots on the assembly line.

The battery uses a cell-to-structure architecture, meaning more of the pack’s volume is taken up by cells, increasing energy density. And there’s a flexible one-piece circuit board on top. A shorter (and therefore lighter) wiring harness is made possible by a switch to 48 V for the low-voltage system. Ford has designed the new platform’s charging system entirely in-house, creating a single high- and low-voltage power-electronics unit for the entire EV. This includes bidirectional charging, although the company has stuck with 400 V for the high-voltage system rather than moving to 800 V or greater. And the pickup will be an entirely software-defined vehicle. Instead of having dozens of discrete electronic control units, each with a single job, the EV will use a zonal architecture with five powerful computers, with one overseeing each zone.

Details like the exact price, EPA range estimate, and sale date will come later, the company told us.