CEO of Ford Jim Farley has revealed that the company developed
a “skunkworks” lab two years ago – a start-up separate from the Ford
mothership, which is aimed at producing electric vehicles at affordable prices.
The lab’s team is being led by Alan Clarke, executive director of advanced EV
development at Ford.
In 2023, Ford reported a loss of $1.6 billion and announced that it would reduce its expenditure on EVs, so it could fulfil customers’ needs in a better way. However, the current news of Ford’s experimentations with low-cost EVs suggests that the company is still adamant on competing with Tesla and other EV automakers like BYD.
It all started with a silent bet that ended up in the formation
of a small, “super-talented” skunkworks team comprising “some of the best EV
engineers in the world” from Auto Motive Power (AMP) to create a low-cost EV
platform, according to Farley. The lab is based in Irvine, California.
The EVs produced by skunkworks will not make an appearance any
time soon, though, as they will be Ford’s third-generation vehicles. They will be
out after the second-generation vehicles, including
an electric truck and a three-row SUV, that are expected to go into
production at the company’s Blue Oval campus in Tennessee, 2025 onwards.
