Tesla Veteran Building Ford’s Next EV Platform | The $30K Electric Truck Explained
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Concept
Advanced EV Development
Advanced EV Development means working on making electric cars better and more efficient with new technology.
Brand
Ford Motor Company
Ford is a big car company from America that makes many types of cars and trucks. They are working on new electric cars that run on batteries instead of gas.
Car
MC20
The MC20 is a very fast and fancy sports car made by Maserati. It’s designed to be exciting to drive and looks great.
Car
Tesla Model X
The Tesla Model X is a big electric SUV with special doors that open up like wings. It has lots of space and runs only on electricity.
Concept
Project Titan
Project Titan is the name Apple uses for their car project. They are working on making a car or car technology, but it is not officially announced yet.
Concept
electric vehicles (EVs)
Electric vehicles are cars that run on electricity instead of gas. They use big batteries to store power and drive the motor.
Car
Ford Ranger
The Ford Ranger is a medium-sized truck that’s bigger than small trucks but not as big as the biggest ones. It’s good for carrying things and driving around town or on rough roads.
Car
Ford Maverick
The Ford Maverick is a small truck that’s easy to drive like a car but can still carry stuff in its back. It’s good if you want a truck but don’t need a big one.
Concept
skunkworks
A skunkworks is a small group inside a company that works on special projects, often new or secret ideas, separate from the main work.
Term
NVH dynamics
NVH means how much noise and shaking you feel inside a car. Engineers work to make cars quieter and smoother to ride in.
Concept
battery size
The battery size means how much electricity the car's battery can hold. Bigger batteries let the car go farther but usually cost more.
Term
battery prices
Battery prices mean how much it costs to make the batteries that power electric cars. These prices have dropped a lot, so electric cars are getting cheaper and easier to buy.
Car
Tesla Model 3
The Tesla Model 3 is a car that runs on electricity instead of gas. It can go far on a single charge and has lots of modern features.
Car
Toyota Corolla
The Toyota Corolla is a small car that many people buy because it’s easy to keep running and doesn’t use much gas. It’s a simple and dependable car for everyday driving.
Car
Tesla Model Y
The Tesla Model Y is an electric SUV that uses batteries to run instead of gas, similar to the Model 3 but bigger and with more space.
Car
Ford F-150 Lightning
The Ford F-150 Lightning is an electric truck that doesn’t use gas. It’s strong and can do many jobs like a regular truck but runs on batteries.
Car
Geo Prism
The Geo Prism was a small, simple car from the 1990s that was easy to drive and didn’t cost much. It was very similar to a Toyota Corolla.
Car
Ford F150
The Ford F-150 is a big truck that many people use for work or carrying heavy stuff. It’s very strong and can do a lot of different jobs.
Car
Rolls-Royce Rolls Royce Ghost
The Rolls-Royce Ghost is a very fancy and expensive car that’s made to be super comfortable and stylish. It’s built with the best materials and is very smooth to ride in.
Car
Ford Mustang
The Ford Mustang is a fast and stylish car that many people love. It’s been popular for a long time and is known for being fun to drive.
Car
Honda Ridge Line
The Honda Ridgeline is a truck that feels more like a car when you drive it. It’s good for carrying things but is easier to drive than big trucks.
Car
Hyundai Santa
The Hyundai Santa Fe is a medium-sized SUV that’s good for families and carrying stuff. It’s comfortable and has many features.
Car
Hyundai Santa Cruz
The Hyundai Santa Cruz is a small truck that’s comfortable like an SUV but can carry things in the back. It’s good for everyday use and small jobs.
Car
Toyota RAV4
The Toyota RAV4 is a small SUV that many people buy because it’s reliable and has plenty of space inside. It’s good for families and everyday driving.
Term
CFD
CFD is a computer program that helps engineers see how air moves around a car. This helps them design cars that can go faster and use less energy.
Car
Toyota A90
The Toyota Supra is a sporty car that’s made to go fast and handle well. Many people like it because it’s fun to drive and can be customized.
Car
Rivian R1T
The Rivian R1T is an electric truck that can drive off-road and has a special shape to help it use less energy. It’s a new kind of truck that runs on batteries.
Car
Toyota Prius
The Toyota Prius is a car that uses both gas and electricity to save fuel. It’s designed to move through the air easily so it uses less gas.
Car
Porsche Taycan
The Porsche Taycan is an electric car that goes very fast and is designed to move through the air easily, which helps it save battery power.
Term
CDA
CDA is a way to measure how much air pushes against a car when it moves. It looks at both how slippery the car is and how big the front of the car is.
Car
Lucid Air
The Lucid Air is a fancy electric car that can go very far on one charge and is designed to be very smooth and efficient.
Car
Mercedes-Benz EQS
The Mercedes-Benz EQS is a very fancy electric car that’s quiet, comfortable, and uses electricity instead of gas. It’s designed to be very smooth and efficient.
Car
Tesla Cybertruck
The Tesla Cybertruck is a new kind of electric truck that looks very different from normal trucks. It’s made to be very tough and powerful.
Car
Renault Wind
The Renault Wind is a small car with a roof that can open up, so you can drive with the wind in your hair. It’s tiny and fun for nice days.
Car
BMW M3
The BMW M3 is a fancy and fast car that’s good at driving on twisty roads. It’s more powerful than regular cars and feels sporty.
Concept
autonomy
Autonomy means cars that can drive themselves or help the driver by controlling steering, braking, and acceleration.
Concept
innovation
Innovation means coming up with new ideas and better ways to make cars and technology work.
Concept
powertrain
Powertrain means the parts of the car that make it move, like the engine and transmission.
Car
Ford Ranchero
The Ford Ranchero was a car that had a truck bed in the back, so you could carry things but still drive like a car. It was popular a long time ago.
Car
Ford Falcon
The Ford Falcon is a type of car that was very popular in Australia. Some versions were like small trucks used for work and fun.
Car
Honda Crv
The Honda CR-V is a small SUV that’s good for families because it’s reliable and doesn’t use too much gas. It’s easy to drive and has plenty of space.
Car
Byd Shark 6
The BYD Shark 6 is an electric car made in China that can go far on a charge. It’s a newer car that many people are starting to notice.
Car
Toyota Hilux
The Toyota Hilux is a strong and tough truck that many people use for work and rough roads. It’s known for lasting a long time and being very reliable.
Part
ECU
An ECU is a small computer in a car that helps control how the engine and other parts work to keep the car running smoothly.
Term
frunk
A frunk is a storage space in the front of a car where the engine usually is, common in electric cars.
Term
ground clearance
Ground clearance is how high a car sits off the ground, which helps it drive over bumps or rough roads.
Concept
model variation
Model variation means the different types or versions of a car that a company sells, like basic or sport versions.
Car
Ford Model T
The Ford Model T was one of the first cars ever made that many people could buy. It helped make cars popular and easy to get.
Car
Tesla Model S
The Tesla Model S is a fancy electric car that can go a long way on one charge and is very fast. It has lots of smart features inside.
Car
Tesla Roadster
The Tesla Roadster is an electric sports car that was the first car Tesla made. It showed people that electric cars can be fast and exciting.
Concept
Honda F1
Honda F1 means Honda's racing team or engines in the fastest car racing competition called Formula 1.
Car
Audi 5000
The Audi 5000 was a fancy car from many years ago with a special engine. Some people remember it because of problems it had, but it was nice for its time.
Car
Audi Quattro
The Audi Quattro is a sporty car that can drive on all wheels, which helps it go fast and stay safe on slippery roads. It was very important in racing.
Car
Mercedes-Benz CLS
The Mercedes-Benz CLS is a fancy car that looks sporty but has four doors like a regular car. It’s good if you want style and space.
LIVE
Welcome to The Inevitable, a podcast by Motortrend.
Hi there, and welcome to The Inevitable.
This is Motortrend's podcast, our podcast about the future of the car, the future of
mobility.
Where are we going?
How are we going to get there?
Today, as always, I'm joined by Ed Lowe, my co-host who's got a message for you, but
just before he does that, this is a long episode.
Much longer than we've done in a while, but it's because the guest is that high quality.
Ed, over to you.
Yes, The Inevitable podcast is brought to you by nobody currently.
We're looking for sponsors.
Shoot me a note, edward.loh.hurst.com, or slide into our DMs on Instagram, at Johnny Learman
and at lowdownlohdwn.
Yes, we do indeed have a great guest.
I could have talked to him for another six hours.
Instead, we just went just over two.
Old school.
Over two.
Ford's Allen Clark, sorry, once again, that's Ford's Allen Clark.
He's the executive director of Advanced EV Development at Ford Motor Company.
Great guy.
He's also a longtime Tesla engineer, worked there for many, many years.
We talk about all that.
We talk in particular about the Ford Universal EV platform, which Allen just did a big deep
dive on.
Yes, you can watch it on YouTube.
I will tell you right now, if you want to get a good visual, understand what we're talking
about, go to YouTube or just Google Ford Bounty Hunters.
Look for that video.
It's about 14 minutes long.
Pretty cool.
It tells you all about Ford's future direction for their EVs, packed with information and
experts, but we're going to talk to the man at the top of that program.
His name is Allen Clark and he's on right now.
Allen Clark.
Woo.
As I live and breathe.
This is tremendous.
Thank you for coming here.
We just did the intro, so we won't go into your title.
Let's just say it again.
Executive director, Advanced EV Development for Ford Motor Company.
You've been there now four years, two months per LinkedIn.
My first question to you is, why aren't you retired?
You have been, you were at, prior to joining Ford, right?
You were at Tesla since 2009.
That's right.
And then you got hired to Ford, hang on, you got hired to Ford in January of 2022.
And they must have had, like for the second question is, where do they pull the dumb truck
of cash to your place to get you to go from Tesla?
Before you answer, I was just hanging out with some buddies of mine that are all longtime
SpaceX engineers who all got Tesla stock at 19 bucks a share and like a GT3, a Maserati,
a MC20.
That's the third question.
We're all the toys.
We're all the toys.
They all showed up.
So first question, you're a young guy, you could, you could be kicking back on a beach
somewhere like, what are you doing?
Like, what, what are you doing?
Yeah.
I mean, some people are cash motivated.
Some people are power motivated.
I am, I'm change, I'm change motivated.
Nice.
Solid answer.
Yeah, I want stories.
I want stories to tell my grandkids.
I want to make a meaningful impact in something you can touch, feel.
And I think I learned that about myself pretty early.
So I was lucky.
I just want to say, because I was reading, you did the front suspension on the Model
S. That was your first thing at Tesla?
I mean, yeah, did is maybe an overstatement.
I worked, I worked around some incredibly intelligent suspension engineers.
I was responsible for releasing it.
Okay.
Like the hard points.
We're going to get into that.
We're going to get into that.
Let's, let's, let's, let's stay on the Ford piece.
I want to talk first about Ford, universal EV platform, but also just, just quickly
because we are going to cover, I think, some of your other projects.
How did you get to Ford?
Like, how did that conversation go?
And was it, I have to guess, it was Doug, Doug Field, who came after you and said,
yo man, you want to come, come join or the thing we're building?
Or how does that work?
You have never heard him say yo man before?
Yeah, he's not a yo man.
Not a yo man kind of guy.
Yep.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, when I was at Tesla, I worked on model three and under, under Doug.
Right.
And, you know, I worked on model X under him as well.
And certainly one of the things I learned is the way he would set up a team, the way
he would create roles and responsibilities, the way he would sort of create interactions
within the team to get the best ideas to come out and then down select them into things
that we would want to ship left a really big imprint on my mind.
And it was certainly one of the densest times of learning in my whole career.
So that's like the, all right, I'm going to pick up the phone when Doug calls kind of
moment.
Then he goes to Apple.
You know, he, he did call me twice when he was working at Apple.
And, you know, I talked in the first time, kind of heard out what he had to say.
He couldn't tell me a lot about what he was working on.
And then this is product Titan as we call it.
Who knows what Apple called it, but at the time, I didn't know what it was called.
But it probably is what it was.
Apple car. Yeah.
The second time I talked to him, I just said, you know, I think if you can tell me when
you're going to ship and that you're definitely going to ship, we should keep talking.
But if not, you know, I don't think this is for me.
How did you know that they may not ship?
That's that's the part, like, because I remember when the plug was pulled on the
Apple car, whatever it was, Project Titan, it seemed like just like a split second
decision, like, how did he, was he telling you something where you're like, this may
not happen, or you just knew enough that, like, things don't always happen in the
Carbiz. I think it's that.
Yeah. I mean, everyone's so tight lipped.
I had no idea what they were working on.
Like now maybe because you could see what equipment they were buying.
You could see who they were hiring.
It was a little bit more obvious, but that was, you know, pretty early.
And so, yeah, I think when, when Doug went to Ford, I think some people said,
all right, well, you know, Doug's going to be an advisor at Ford.
But I know Doug well enough that I think he's taken on something really hard,
really meaningful, something that, you know, he thinks is really important.
So he called, he said, you know, this is what we're doing.
We have these ideas.
Let's, you know, let's chat about it.
So and you know, Ford is going to make cars and trucks and SUVs.
Like that's that's right.
It's not like it's not the iPhone company.
Making tablets.
Robots.
Yeah.
Who knows about that?
Let's not, let's not rule things out.
Are you the reason why this, the new EV?
I don't know what you call it.
Why your building, why the whole thing moved to Long Beach?
Because was that sort of conditional?
Like I'm not going to go to Dearborn or would you have moved for Doug?
Would you have gone up to Northern California?
Or do you spend a lot of time with there?
I do.
But yeah, at the time, I didn't know what I was going to do at all.
So when he called it was, I think, I think we need help.
We need to do things differently in EVs.
What if we just stood up an architecture team?
And you know, at Tesla, that's what I was doing.
And so I thought, all right, I think I'm capable of that.
I think I can go find really smart people who want to do it with me.
And I ended up, you know, that was sort of the remit at first.
And at that point as well, it was 2022.
Everyone's working from home for the most part still.
And so it was, all right, we'll figure out how this goes.
And then maybe I'll move to the Bay Area or maybe I'll move to Michigan.
Went home, talked to the wife and she said, sure, let's consider moving the family
maybe for one, two years.
I'm willing to try that out.
And then I started and then they said, hey, you know, there's an office in Irvine.
And so drove down to Irvine, met the team there.
Turns out there was some space.
And so we ended up starting the office in Irvine, California.
And then, you know, think as years progressed, then we said, OK, well, we have
to probably do some of our own software.
OK, let's hire for that in Palo Alto.
That's where the talent base is primarily.
And then all these other things happened with, you know, Faraday and canoe
and an app, whatever was happening at Apple.
And, you know, and both Rivian and Lucid having issues up and down,
like the talent pool having, being very dynamic in that time frame.
Then we just sort of kept building in both locations.
But the Irvine location, we really quickly ran out of space.
And every time we tried to say, you know, hey, we want a high voltage lab here.
You know, good luck.
This is a design studio, not a high voltage lab.
So then we started looking for spaces.
I had some very distinct criteria.
You know, engineers want to be quickly off the 405 somewhere.
They want to be able to live from the west side all the way down to, you know,
San Clemente or maybe even San Diego for some of our engineers.
You know, some want to live on more land inland.
Some want to live near the coast.
So we we searched from Torrance all the way down to Irvine.
And then we found this Douglas Park area, which was really special.
And that's in Long Beach.
That's right. Yeah.
And you live at the convenient because you also live in Long Beach.
Very convenient.
I see how that works.
But it's interesting, because I've heard other people say that there actually
is this incredible talent pool of like EV specific engineering talent
in Southern California and northern, obviously, but in Southern California
because GM had a lab out here, you know, you always read like, you know,
Rivian's laid off 5% of the workforce suddenly.
And it's like, well, those people are all Irvine, you know.
So, yeah.
And then two years ago, we we bought a company called Automotive Power.
OK, really smart power electronics engineers and software engineers.
And same story, like this hidden talent pool in SoCal that, you know,
we didn't know existed at the time.
Interesting.
For when you were at Tesla for all those years, were you you were primarily in
Hawthorne or no?
Primarily in Hawthorne.
I moved once to the Bay Area.
OK.
And that was for a project that's never been announced back in 2010, probably.
And then, you know, I got canceled and then they moved me back to Southern California.
Would you like to announce it now?
I wouldn't. OK.
Was that Palo Alto or Fremont?
That was San Carlos.
Oh, OK. Even before.
So that was a. Oh, right, right, right.
Very, very early.
OK. OK.
So so Doug calls, you pick up the phone, you say, OK, I'm in.
What.
What exactly did he sell you on?
Like, what was the what was the pitch?
The pitch was we want to go into affordable vehicles.
We want to go into affordable EVs and we don't want them to be boring.
And the entire leadership and the board is completely on board with doing it a
different way, help us do it in a different way.
So, you know, I I trust Doug a lot and I've spent a lot of time with Doug,
but I also didn't believe him.
So then I talked to Jim and then I talked to Bill and then I talked to a few
members of the board.
That's Jim Farley and Bill Ford, if you're playing at home.
OK. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Bill and Jim, yeah.
Yeah. And then, you know, I think.
Jim said that he said two things that I thought were great was one was you'll
never learn about what the product specs are going to be on the product that
you're working on from Twitter.
It was called Twitter at the time.
Right.
That was a very typical thing that happened to me quite a bit at Tesla.
I was like, oh, is this what we're doing now?
OK.
And then the second is that we'd be working on cars.
Right.
Right.
I think at the time I was working a lot on autonomous things and humanoid things.
It was, you know, I've got cars in my veins and I've always loved cars.
It's a sickness.
I can't cure it.
Like I said, you're Ford.
You're going to be building cars.
We're going to finish with that.
We're going to talk about the personal stuff.
But OK, so we got the setup.
So now you're four years later and you dropped this Ford Bounty Hunters video.
This is kind of like you're coming out party, right?
Like nobody knew who.
I mean, we know within industry, but like you're out there.
You have the cool leather jacket on.
You're talking about the team.
You're talking about this product.
You're giving this vehicle and you're giving all sorts of hints about what it
might look like, which we're going to get into.
I think we'll say this in the intro, but if you haven't seen it, the whole context
of like the first part of this podcast is what Alan Clark is doing with Ford
with the Universal EV platform.
I love calling it FUEV.
I know that's a I'm going to get a pillage for that.
But the Ford Universal EV platform, there's a video out.
Go to YouTube, search word called Ford Bounty Hunters.
It's all about the efficiency piece.
I will commend you guys.
I'm a former science teacher.
That's a lot of science to put into about 15 minutes.
And I would it's it's going like this over.
I think a lot of people's heads.
I had to watch it about five times.
I watched it. I'm not very smart.
And I watched it once.
I thought it was pretty except for Vlad, who is the most interesting, but also like,
you know, did you read the fine print?
There's a lot of fine print, which we're going to get into.
I mean, there was no details, but yeah, who is that video for?
Who who are like, what's the point of doing?
What's the audience?
Yeah, who's the audience?
I think it's the industry.
OK, so it's people who like cars, who want to work on cars,
who, you know, trying to learn how to make EVs.
And, you know, I think it's working.
We've had people who are sort of on the fence about, you know,
should I join this effort?
And they call call up and say, hey, watch the video I'm joining.
Well, it's a hiring video.
It's like, is it a recruiting video?
Like it's got it's got many purposes.
I would say that's one of them.
But I think what we what we heard in August, when we talked about
where we're going to build this vehicle, which is which is in Louisville.
So that's Louisville Assembly plant in Kentucky.
The old escape plant.
Yeah. Escape Coursera was built there.
That's right. And so we, you know, we talked about that.
We talked about Louisville Battery Park in Marshall, Michigan,
where we're building lithium ion phosphate batteries.
You know, we had a lot of people basically said, this is great.
We really like how Ford's starting to show the process of how hard it is to make
EVs, what it takes to make EVs, the talent to make EVs that are, you know,
different than what we were making before.
So I think that started this, you know, continuous movement into us,
maybe sharing a little bit more of the journey with everyone of what it takes
to make an affordable EV.
Right. And if you haven't watched the video and you're listening right now,
you guys are announcing the first offering is a small or mid-sized truck.
I imagine a little bit bigger than Maverick, maybe similar to Ranger,
maybe a little smaller, as hard to tell, that kind of general.
Okay. And. He's nodding his head.
Yeah. And you said like 300 miles-ish of range, maybe a little bit more.
And what was fascinating to me was like, you know, like, you know, the front
subframe, instead of being like whatever, a lot of parts, it's going to be two parts
or two parts total, make up the subframe with these.
Three. Unicastings.
Yeah. Okay. So.
We're getting heavy. We're getting heavy. Yes.
That's all I want to give people contact.
So we compared it specifically to the Maverick.
Right.
And so the Maverick, if you take up the front parts and the rear parts of the structure,
it's 146 parts.
Okay.
We're now using one in the front and one in the back.
Yeah. So two parts.
So two parts. And, you know, I think the important thing there is not just, okay,
you've condensed the amount of assembly, like it changes your factory, right?
Your factory doesn't have all these robots, bot welding things together.
It's that when we talk about this new skunkworks thing, it's been married with the thing that
Ford's already really good at.
Manufacturing.
Manufacturing structural analysis, NVH dynamics.
Ford's really strong in a bunch of different areas.
And so.
And trucks.
And trucks. Good one.
So I mean, these, these castings are very light compared to the ones that we can buy
on the open market and benchmarks ourselves against.
But they're also the basis by which we assemble the vehicle, which is different.
So instead of the assembly line, it's now an assembly tree.
So there's a huge amount of sub assembly work that happens on these individual parts
outside the vehicle, which changes sequencing and changes
like the way the factory looks is different now.
Okay. I want to talk about that.
But let's try to get, did a good setup in terms of what the vehicles,
what the first vehicle is that was alluded to in this Bounding Hunters video.
But I want to go from the mission statement piece that you put out there in the first like
45 seconds of the video, which is to build great EVs that are not just fun to drive,
but compete on price with the best, including gas vehicles.
That's literally like, I was, I was, I wrote it and it's like, this is a mission statement.
I think this is like their, this is like the page one of their PowerPoint deck on this thing.
Might actually be.
Yes.
So great EVs, not just fun to drive, compete on price
with the best, including gas vehicles.
Then you go immediately into size of the battery, reducing the size to reduce the cost.
Okay. So the first of all the AI assisted questions I'm going to ask you is,
because you've talked about this a lot, why, why is this so critical?
You go into this, I'm excuse me for making you repeat some of it, but
battery prices have fallen by like an order of, it's like, since about, I double check this,
15 years, they've gone from like $1,000 per kilowatt hour to now just about,
I think Bloomberg is 108.
And hopefully going down.
Well, the next year's production is going to taper a little bit.
Wait, what's the target?
You know, you, you, you want a smaller battery, you want a lighter vehicle.
So a smaller battery, a lighter, a lighter battery.
And then you, and then you have the chemistry, which is LFP, which is also cheaper.
Like, do you have a particular cost per kilowatt hour target you're, you're trying,
you're, you're, you're getting after?
The target is lower.
That's about it.
We just don't stop.
I mean, this is keep finding performance.
And, you know, I think that's sort of the formula one methodology.
It's the, this, we're at a critical juncture where we're crossing the cost of a nice power
train with an EV power train.
And, you know, that happens.
You mean crossing, meaning you're hitting, you're close to parity.
Once you hit parity, you know, there's not really, unless you're driving 600 miles a day.
Which no one does.
That's a total outlier.
Or you're towing massive amounts.
People do do.
Which people do.
Then, you know, the EV is the best vehicle for you.
Right.
Okay.
Great.
Cause I had a question about parity because we, because I'm trying to figure out where,
like, how far do you, you know, as lower as a nice answer, of course you want to, but there,
there are, there are constraints, right?
The current cost of like a, I tried to do this comparison in several different ways.
Let's call it a Model 3 versus like a Corolla.
The power train costs for the Corolla are somewhere in the neighborhood of $4,000 to $5,000
per the, for the engine, maybe $2,000 to $3,000 for the transmission.
So call it $8,000.
And then in the Model Y batteries make up the largest chunk of the power train.
And then they're the mo, and for a rear drive, a single motor,
you're going to know this.
I'm going to try to look at your face while like, likely around $10,000, maybe.
I mean, that's the thing is it's just moving so fast.
So the power train cost is going lower, battery costs, so the $108 that you mentioned,
I don't know if you're talking about at the battery level or the cell level.
Battery, I asked the question, is battery, Bloomberg, Bloomberg said battery.
And then also that in China, LFP batteries are getting down into the, for volume,
$84 per kilowatt hour.
I've seen numbers as low as $53 per kilowatt hour.
That's good, which is quite obscenely low.
And we just don't know how much it's subsidized by the government buying,
paying for the capital for all the conversion capabilities.
You don't know unless you're the manufacturer and you're actually making it yourself
and you're buying the raw materials.
And that's the track that we're on.
That's why we're making batteries ourselves in Marshall, Michigan.
You have to build up that capability to build the most expensive part of your vehicle.
Today, Ford has lots of transmission plants and engine plants, and we understand the cost
for those incredibly well.
And we spent the last 100 plus years optimizing those.
And so if you look at, all right, what's the next most expensive thing?
That's why we're focused on at least a portion of our cells coming from
a place where we make them ourselves.
So you want to get a battery though that, because at the top it was around 300 miles,
from your video, from the Boundary 500 video, around 300 miles of range in a vehicle.
Again, that's cost competitive with the best, including gas vehicles.
And using LFP, I'm basically trying to arrive at the cell, the pack size,
which I think people are speculating is somewhere in the neighborhood of,
would it be 50 or 60 kilowatt hour?
The thing is we're not going to do one battery.
We're going to do multiple.
And we know we need that because customers have different use cases.
Multiple for the first vehicle.
I know you're going to do multiple.
It's a universal platform.
So you're going to have a longer wheelbase.
You're going to do a two, a three row crossover or SUV, maybe do a van.
You'll do a sedan.
But you're going to start with a truck.
Are you saying you're going to likely have, like with a lightning,
a standard and a long range or a larger and a smaller pack?
So I think what we've talked about so far is the mid-sized pickup truck.
We're going to have a single LFP battery to start off with.
But we have opportunity for multiple
chemistries and form factors that fit inside that same battery.
Well, that wasn't me.
My question was, you know, LFP, I understand, you know, it's cheaper.
It has had some advantages, has a lot of disadvantages.
And you said multiple chemistries.
So multiple LFP chemistries, or you would actually do lithium ion or lithium sodium
or other, is the battery plant working on that?
I think the most important thing is that we're agnostic to what the chemistry is
with the way that it's coupled.
So we've done the hardest thing first.
And that's the lowest cost, highest volume of battery.
So lithium ion phosphate has low specific energy and volumetric energy density,
which means that it's the largest thing.
It's in a, we've done it in a prismat.
And that prismat, we're directly structurally coupling to the battery.
So you're saying that LFP battery has to be larger physically than a lithium ion battery.
Everything is better with the other chemistries.
Everything's lighter and smaller.
More dense energy.
You can put in extra structure to protect it.
You can put in extra structure to couple it if you want to.
So it gives you more capability.
You can even insulate it if you wanted to.
So, you know, I think lithium ion phosphate has worse cold weather performance.
So you have to then ideally have an amazing thermal management system
on your software.
You're starting with this worse solution because it's the cheaper solution?
It is lower cost.
And we have methods to make sure that the customer gets the most amount of value out of it,
including bi-directional.
So it's also the good things about it are that it's very, very durable energy throughput.
And you can, again, for apartment dwellers who have to charge to 100% because they're not
allowed to have chargers at home, they don't have to worry about charging to 100%.
They can just do it and forget about it.
We will not only encourage that, but I think psychologically as a customer,
when you buy something and you never see it hit 100% and you're afraid of making it hit 100%
because it'll damage it, it's not a good feeling, right?
It's a weird, you get used to it, but it is a weird feeling.
It's just strange.
Okay, the logic makes sense.
The truck's gonna be, Ford does trucks.
Truck leadership, Ford rams that down and throws every opportunity.
So you're gonna make the workhorse of this universal EV platform
use the most affordable, the most durable.
Makes a lot of sense.
You said something in there, the form factors basically locked in for these prismatic cells.
So like the fact that it's a structural battery and I watched the animation of the cells going in
and prismatic is basically like a prism.
It's a box.
It's not a packet or like a, what do you call it?
A bunch of cells.
So does that mean, does this new form factor you're building for this first mid-size pickup truck,
all the batteries coming are gonna utilize that same prismatic shape?
Form.
All of the first products that we come out with will use that prismatic shape.
But you know, prismatic shapes, well, cylindrical is a prismatic shape, I guess.
So rectilinear for lithium-ion phosphate, you have to fill every last little nook and cranny with
the chemistry of the battery because it's inefficient from an energy standpoint.
Versus, you know, cylindricals tend to have nickel-based chemistries in them,
but you can waste the little spaces in between all the cylinders because they're so much more
energy dense than lithium-ion phosphate.
So it's what's at the pack level that matters most in what you can deliver.
And it's even, I mean, it's a fascinating landscape.
The costs are, you know, continue to be artificial in terms of what the near-term and long-term costs
are because you can look at the first principles, physics, like what atoms go into these things
and then what equipment do you have to buy and then what's the labor content and automation cost,
depreciating all of the things that have to go into this and then where the raw material is
going to come from and what's the logistics cost of that.
That's one way of doing it.
And that's where we look at these curves of battery costs just continue to go down and down and down.
But then there's also the artificial side of it, which is, you know, the industry movement, right,
is this lull in EVs means a glut of capacity, which artificially changes the costs.
You have automakers that are moving away from 2170s, making 2170s an interesting form factor as well.
So the real headline here is like agility is is crucial to competition here.
You have to be able to adapt to different form factors,
chemistries, you have to have the software capability to build new battery management systems,
to be able to fast charge, be able to thermally manage.
And if, you know, I think giving money to suppliers each time you want to do those is
going to get really expensive if you actually want to be agile.
So you're developing in-house stability like almost rhetorical, but like, you know,
when solid state batteries are ready, you guys will be able to do that in-house.
You won't have to go to a supplier.
And if, you know, I keep hearing about Mercedes has been talking about lithium-sodium
technology about 12 months away, which is like 20% more dense than lithium ion or power dense.
You guys will have all that expertise in-house.
Yeah. I mean, certainly even before I came to the company, Ford has some pretty incredible
battery expertise. And we sort of augmented that and continue to build the capability.
So yeah, Ford has a lot of capability to, I think, use, work with suppliers directly on
things that are coming out. We can't really do all of it.
And then, you know, we'll keep developing the things that we think are really important for us
to have no ion capabilities. Okay. Just related, and we can move them,
talk a little bit about Aero. And I misspoke. So you have two unicast things, which we'll get to.
And then in the middle is the structural battery that has these prismatic LFP cells.
What? And you said that it can accommodate for different or future chemistries.
Was there any kind of limiting factor in that, in the shape or in the manufacturing? Because,
you know, again, I watched your bounty hunters video like five times. You got all this cool stuff
in the pack. You put all of the wiring, this printed circuit board, everything is sort of
modular, right? Is that the right way to put it? Like, you don't have to add a bunch of stuff
additionally. It's the E-box, right? You had like the one E-box,
it's just all everything is contained in this thing, you can pop it in and out.
Does that limit what other, like is there a, oh, shoot, we're going to put solid state batteries
in this thing. And now it's a completely different center section for the structural battery,
or it can all fit in this, it all fits in this box. It all fits in the box. Okay, that's the whole
point. And I think height, height is a very, you know, when you, when you're doing a platform,
you're looking at the lightest thing you're ever going to make, the heaviest thing you're ever
going to make, the longest thing you're ever going to make, the shortest thing you're ever
going to make, widest, narrowest, and then saying, all right, if I, if I cover an F-150
Raptor width, I'm going to carry this much scar mass and scar massed on all vehicles.
Scar massed? Scar mass? Scar mass means like you pick up that mass in a base platform,
if you don't make it a variable that you can. Oh, okay, I know what you, so when BMW put the
five series, seven series and Rolls Royce Ghost on the same platform, the five series was really
fat all of a sudden, because it had to be able to also be a 5,500 pound car. Totally, yeah.
So we call that scar mass or scar cost. Right, okay, cool. I mean, if you don't know,
you know, architecture and product design, it's all about decisions and making decisions in the
right order, connected in the right way. There's a butterfly effect where you make a decision
early on, and then suddenly your factory looks different. And, you know, scar mass and scar
cost are ways of measuring those, because the customer gets impacted directly by those types
of things. Right. Yeah. Today I learned a new word. I've known about scar mass and talk about it
all the time, but I just never knew there was a term for it. Okay, so that's great, because that
informs, again, for the people who are listening, like, what are you guys talking about? We'll go
watch the video. Cars are about platforms, is what we're talking about. Well, there are lots of
shots, long shots of Alan and his colleagues standing in front of this sort of, it's like a
digital illustration of this vehicle in a, you know, like a wind tunnel, like the lines going
over the back. And what he essentially is, this is the first of this universal EV platform. And
depending on whatever the vehicle specifications are for the end product, you're going to be able
to move the wheelbase out or in, depending on the size of the battery you want to put there,
because you can make the car a lot wider. I don't know why you would, but you're going to,
you're going to have for a raptor, you're going to have this flexibility within, I guess, these
three main parts, the front casting, the rear casting, and then this structural battery in
between. Is that, that's an accurate super layman explanation of the point here? That's an excellent
explanation. Okay. I thought that the best part of the video was really, was the part where I was
like, well, was when you guys were, I think it was that Vlad gentlemen was talking about how
you can't have one reason for a change or has to be, or for a part has to have two functions.
The best part is no part. The second best part is one that has multiple functions. And the first
time I heard about that in passenger cars, I've heard none about that for like F1. That's, you
know, an A dream new principle. But with another Adrian new product was with the Aston Martin
Valkyrie. The does like whatever you want to think about the car or whatever that thing that's
thing that the fact that that car saw the light of day is insane because like they would be like,
you know, we want five more millimeters of shoulder room. And he's like, you got to come up
with two reasons why driver comfort isn't enough. You know, and so that really fascinated me because
really, the video made it sound like you're really applying like real race car decision-making
to a $30,000 economy product. Like, is it the cost-benefit analysis? That's a weird way to
build a cheap car, I guess is what I'm saying. Yeah. And you can't, what you're describing,
it's really tough to do if you're process-oriented. Right. Right. So, you know, going from A to Z
on making a car, you eventually say, all right, I'm going to keep making more different types of
cars that are similar to this last car. To efficiently do that, you create a set of requirements
and rules, you create organizational structures, you create process that keeps those organizations
delivering to the same timelines. Right. And Ford in the past has really been hamstrung by that.
You know, I recommend everyone who likes cars read the book Car about the making of the second
gen Ford Taurus and how even though the first gen Ford Taurus was the beat Honda and Toyota
suddenly was the best selling car in the U.S., it was six months late and the project manager was
fired and was seen as a failure internally because it broke the Ford process. So, it's interesting
that, and I know this is why Doug was hired, was to end what, why maybe getting away from Michigan
because GM also suffers from this and so, sorry to cut you off, but it's fascinating to hear this.
Yeah. I mean, it's to get the systems engineering benefits, which is pretty much just a complicated
way of saying, you know, get people to collaborate and think about other areas that are not their own.
When you say the best part is no part, the first of all is finding the no part is surprisingly
challenging. Yeah. You know, Vladimir, who you're talking about in the video, he had to talk to
every single engineer with any hardware across the entire vehicle in order to find those opportunities
with the same thing. If you want to find a part that can do multiple things, an exteriors engineer
might need to talk to a closures engineer that needs to talk to a structures engineer to say,
hey, do you guys want to delete your part? Because we can combine this into a single thing,
make it into a casting or make it into a forging or, you know, change the product form
or ask the question all the way to the top of, hey, does the customer even care about this?
Do we want it? Well, let's talk about one of those. And I want to get back to the overall arrow
piece because you open the door. The mirror in particular, the mirror housing, you talk,
there's a talk about how to adjust the mirror, you need one actuator, right? And then to make it
fold, you need another. So in this, in this new pickup truck, you're going to combine and have
one that does both. Does that mean it's like an old school like truck mirror where
the entire, basically the reflective part of the mirror is mounted to the housing. And if you
were just adjusting it to look the whole thing moves, and then when you turn off and walk away,
it did the whole piece folds. That's it. That's it. Okay. So then, but then there's only one position
for optimal arrow then, right? Based on the shape of the housing. Valid point. Okay. So that means
the arrow and emphasis have to go take wind tunnel models to the full scale wind tunnel and then
simulate in CFD as well as run in the wind tunnel, a bunch of different mirror positions.
But it's, I mean, I love, I love all this because it's really race car thinking, you know, it's,
again, back to Newie, I read his book, but like, you know, Graham here, Graham there,
eventually it's a kilogram. I would say the F1, does the F1 have mirrors? They do,
but they don't, the housing is optimized for arrow. And they're probably called, no, they don't,
everything is secondary enough. What I'm saying is the obsession with weight saving.
Right. Because I kept, I kept, you know, again, like I, how did I put this, in the video, you
guys were very proud and like, you know, and that saves, you know, like one ounce or, you know,
it was like, I understand that's a big deal, but I think like a lot of people are watching like,
what? Like you're excited about $1.30, you know, but it all, it all adds up to something.
We're like 30 minutes, so we have to do the spiciest part of this, which is you're showing
the, the, the, the side view of this potential pickup truck, right? And you're trying to be
clever because you got the lines going over it, and then you can kind of see a cut line for where
the cab's going to hit the bed and other sites, not us, we didn't do you dirty, like drew a line
and said, this is boys going to make a truck, looks like this looks terrible.
Well, yeah.
It looks like the truck law. You remember Simone Geertz, this YouTube lady a few years ago,
took a Tesla Model Y, I cut the back off of it, like defend yourself. It's got, from what you
see in the video, it's got a pretty high body side relative to, it looks like the greenhouse,
and it's got a swooping sort of Model Y, but you know, sort of like a, not a traditional,
not a Maverick, not an F-150, chunky monkey block front end, and then a very defined cabin,
a long bed. It has a very aerodynamic, you guys, I think mentioned teardrop shape, plus,
it looks like it'd be a pretty short bed.
Truck law, right? We got, you guys are going to build the, the truck law?
Definitely not a truck law.
Look up truck law. I think that was even, that was even a Model 3 that she started with.
It was earlier than the Y existed, I think.
So it's not, it's going to look way better.
Not a truck law. So I think what, what we talked about a bunch is, I think it'd be
easy to make a very aerodynamic, efficient truck that's a teardrop.
You probably wouldn't like what it looks like, and
Prius Camino, yeah. It's easy to do, yeah.
The Hold and Pickup Truck or whatever they call it.
I mean, we, so we had a quote early on, which was immediately aesthetically desirable,
and we created, we created all these sort of terms that the team
used as slogans. Okay.
And we'd look at it and say, is it immediately aesthetically desirable?
Are you drawn to it? No. Okay. Keep, keep trying.
It's, you know, it's funny for, I give them a lot of credit because I remember,
I got a, before the Mustang, the Maki came out.
When we all heard they were making a Mustang SUV, but it was like, wait, but,
and I went to Detroit, and, you know, we go down in the basement somewhere,
and deep dark secrets, and, but what struck with me wasn't so much the actual vehicle,
it was like what they were working on before they decided to make it sexy.
And it was just this awful like compliance car, and I think Farley was there,
and he said like, you know, like, we were building a car we didn't want to build for,
you know, dealers didn't want to sell it to customers who didn't want to buy it.
And we're looking, this is really horrible looking at 90s, like Pontiac type of like,
this is the future, you know, and, and so he's like, you know, we decided to make it sexy and,
you know, appealing. And I'm like, you know,
that's a good decision. So he told me that story before I joined Ford.
And that's one of the reasons why I joined Ford. Yeah. And so I gave him a lot of credit
because I think, I think like you look at the Chevy Bolt, like they did not make that decision.
Right. They made other decisions, very fine product,
but it's not immediately aesthetically appealing. And I, you know,
immediately aesthetically desirable desirable to whom to a traditional truck buyer. Are you
to a new like, who is going to like, because I think you're still, I mean,
based on the profile, you should assume you look similar to that, you're going to still have folks
to be like, this looks, you know, look at Ridge, the Honda Ridge line, pretty close to a truck.
Uh-huh. You know, you had a Hyundai Santa Cruz reference in the fine print at the bottom of
your video for the era, which we want to talk about. Also, a lot of people like, that's not a
truck. Like the Maverick, which is the same as the Santa Cruz functionally, like get to pass
because it looks like it looks like it looks like it looks, it's a two box. Like, so who,
who is this immediately aesthetically desirable for?
Well, I mean, I think street credit for being a truck is very important.
So it actually has to have the feature, the aesthetic features to say that's a truck.
What does a truck do? It, it tows, you can put your mountain bike over the tailgate,
you can reach over the side to get things in the front of the bed.
We had a long talk about that.
I'm not pandering to the audience here.
No, we had a long talk. Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, so.
That's crucial.
So yeah, I think there's some, some important like boxes you have to check just to make sure,
hey, it is a pickup truck. Um, the, we have to put that fine print in there.
We, we're constantly think about who's going to call bullshit on this.
Like if we say we have the most aerodynamically efficient truck, like make sure that everyone,
we check all the boxes of like, we compare ourselves against all of these different
trucks and vehicles. Um, but who, you know, who is the actual customer?
I think we're likely to have more SUV buyers coming into a pickup truck for the first time
than anything else. And, you know, it really is a, the pickup truck is a very universal.
I mean, it's called the universal EV, but it's a universal body form that allows you
to do a lot of different things. It's incredibly flexible.
And once it's an EV, you have secure lockable frunk.
One of the gripes with any pickup truck is, you know, where do I put my stuff?
I have to put maybe my stinky stuff inside the cabin with me because I have an open bed.
Then you've got a cabin size that's larger than a Toyota RAV4, which is the number one
selling SUV in the world. And then you have the towing as well as the stuff capability in the back.
So, you know, our hypothesis is that many people will say, this is my first pickup truck.
Okay. I think it makes sense because this is again, I think the knife cuts two ways for Ford.
You guys have, again, best F series number one selling truck for Ford for close to 50 years now.
Unless GM would ever like actually take GMC and Chevy sales and combine them.
Inside baseball math. Also have the Ranger, also have the Maverick. So, it's like,
how are you going to get somebody who's already either a customer or considering Ranger or Maverick
to look at this EV pickup truck? So, it has to be a newer, a different consumer. I notice that you
put capability and then cabin and then towing one, two, three and then bed fourth. Is that the,
is it, it looks like a pretty short bed. Are you not expecting people to use it as much because
Ford has other trucks that have longer beds? Is this going to be like a four foot, like a shorty,
a short bed pickup truck? No, I think we expect people to use it. But you're, yeah,
you're really good at reading into the details. Is the bed Maverick size?
It's a Maverick size. Okay, so four and a half feet. Is it, will it have any fancy features like
midgate, like convertible or bed extender, or the fan, like Rivian did a really fancy thing,
right, with yours? Very fancy tailgate. Where the tailgate then makes it longer.
Yeah, if you want to, it drops down, yeah. So, yeah, I think it's also very expensive to fix that
tailgate. We have to sort of put, put this into chapters, like help people understand,
okay, here's, here's how we got to the platform. Okay, once we get to the platform,
then we're going to roll out a bunch more details about what the actual product is,
keep people excited, get people engaged, make sure that you know what's coming.
You know, all the features that you just mentioned, there are things that we talked
about constantly during the architecture of the platform as well as the first product.
And everything is really healthy, long-term debate, some of it balanced with market studies,
some of it balanced with asking people what they do like and don't like,
and then eventually rolling up into a bunch of architectural decisions,
even to a point where like, should we, should we put it in there? Should we make it optional?
Should we not have it at all? And each of those then comes with a bunch of manufacturing constraints
that then create scar mass and scar cost. It's a really roundabout way of saying I'm not going to
tell you, but maybe help you understand how complicated this is.
Okay, but real quick though, with the arrow, before we move off the arrow, it's funny that
the worst thing about EVs, the thing that EVs do the worst is go 80 miles an hour for a long time.
That's like, that's where they suck. And they're real good at like running around town,
stopping and starting, recapture energy, but you guys mentioned it several times in the video,
like as speed increases, by whatever amount, the resistance doubles and then takes four times
the power. If you go twice as fast, the arrow holds you back four times as much and you need
eight X power to keep going to speed. Yeah, squared and to the third power.
Yeah. And so when you're just like steady state, 80 miles an hour at highway speeds,
as I'm calling it, like they're not good. So aerodynamics are really important with EVs,
much more so. Yeah, I want to add a couple of things to that though. Please. One is that,
you know, when we think about aerodynamics, many people think stick a car in a wind tunnel,
optimize it, you're good. Our focus is not just on that. It's also on yaw optimization. So that
means we test our vehicle at many different angles in the wind tunnel and in CFD. Oh, interesting.
Okay. And the important thing there is you're very rarely driving with no wind anywhere. Yeah,
you might have a 90 degree crosswind that's five miles an hour. Ultimately, that's maybe three
degrees of yaw of the air. Boy, I can tell you a story. Yeah, yaw sensitivity is very important.
And we think that that ultimately is a promise to a customer you may be not keeping if you're
not good at that, right? You have an EPA five cycle range number or two cycle range number,
whatever shows up on the sticker. And then you say, all right, that's my range. You go on your
first road trip. And if it's not that, it's, hey, why is it not that? And they don't care.
That's the wrong way. This is known as Tesla mileage to the EV community where it's just like,
interesting. Boy, it's rated at 300 and I got like 220 and like, so.
Yeah, in reality, it's physics, right? It's just, you know, you're going faster. The other thing is
that as much as we talk about getting more driving range, we often forget to talk a lot about the
fact that it makes your charging times better as well. So the more efficient your vehicle is,
the lower your charging times are. And once your charging time goes lower and lower and lower,
or once your efficiency goes higher and higher and higher, eventually you're basically saying,
you know, I could just plug into a normal wall outlet. I don't need an expensive charger.
I don't need to go to a DC fast charger. Then you start talking about miles per minute or miles
per hour rather than, you know, how long does it take to go from empty to full? Right.
Speaking about efficiency and aerodynamics, I watched a bit with Salim Merck,
Salim's piece was great. Early on, it said it's 15% more efficient than the most aerodynamic
truck on the market. And then like two minutes later, it actually, it showed that you're benchmarking
Maverick and a 2025 Maverick and a 20, I think it was 2022 Hyundai Santa Cruz. But before I did
that, I ran through Google and I said, well, it's the most aerodynamic truck on the marketplace.
It's your truck. Rivian R1T at 0.30 coefficient of drag.
Oh, really? That's aerodynamic.
Yeah. Santa Cruz, they said, is 0.37 and Maverick estimate, because apparently you guys don't
release that, 0.33 to 0.35. A 15% improvement on Johnny's truck and a Rivian R1T would put it
0.25, which would be better than a Prius or a... About the same as a Prius.
Prius 0.27, a Taycan or a Model X. Which one? From the aerodynamics benchmarking,
is it what you put at the bottom, Santa Cruz and Maverick, or did you guys actually benchmark a
Rivian R1T? Yeah, we benchmark all of those. But I think the reason why that's confusing is because
CD is only part of the story. A is the other part of the story. So once you add in CDA,
so you got to go back to AI and say, now look at frontal area of those vehicles, and then you
get the numbers. Okay. So it's not just drag coefficient. It's drag coefficient plus something
else equals times the frontal area. Because of the R1T is massive compared to what you're building.
Yeah. I mean, yeah, it's not massive compared to what we're building.
But bigger.
It's bigger. Small changes in frontal area have large energy impacts.
Right, right, right. Just going to have some gnarly front air dam
lip like a lot of these trucks have to keep the arrow in check.
I hope not. Okay. Well, I want to make your marketing team cringe here and punch them in the
gut. Are you going to have a claim that this truck's going to be more aerodynamic efficient
than a Toyota Prius? Because that's what I saw. I was like, oh, maybe that's what they're going
to say. Is it, is that, is there any consumer production car that you're going to target
for like, we're, we're slicker than a fill-in-the-blank? No. No? Okay. No, I don't think. And I think
I'm so curious. Are you not really involved in the marketing? No, he's building the spec.
The marketing team, they don't know anything. They're going to look at like, what do you guys,
what do you got? They're like, well, we could do this, this, and this. I'm like, oh, I intuitively
agree. The marketing team knows nothing. We're going to make an ad out of that. That's great.
That's going to our Super Bowl ad. Right. Okay. All right. I'll jump in to defend the marketing
team. I think they have really taken the challenge of, hey, this is different. Okay. And are doing
things very differently as a result. I apologize. I don't, I don't like marketing. But I was going
to say, like, it's tough, like with claims like that, like most aerodynamic, because, you know,
we have this where it's like, there's no way to test it. Like, I remember like, I was talking.
There's a cost down. There's a, you can. Yeah. I remember like, like when, when the Lucid air
came out and they were like, it's the most aerodynamic. Here's our drag coefficient, 0.2,
whatever it was. Oh, I got that. And then, and then Mercedes was like, actually the EQS is the most.
And I was like, I don't have a wind tunnel. Like, how do I settle this? And I was talking to a
friend of Mercedes and they're like, we have a much bigger marketing budget. We will win this
battle over Lucid. I was like, all right, you know, so Ford has, you know, big marketing budget.
You guys talked about it when I wasn't here. So let's, let's cover this piece and then move on
to Vlad's part of the video. And then quickly. If I throw my kids bag into the back of this
cab. Yeah. Can I, I'm just under six feet tall. You're like seven feet tall. Can I reach into
the back and not have to climb on the tire and grab the ball? Yes. Oh, great. Yeah. So, and
actually someone who is really passionate about this, someone I work really closely with on,
and when I was at Tesla, his name is Dan Smith, human factors and ergonomics expert,
absolute product obsession about every way. For that reason. For that reason.
You know, I was really lucky. He decided to take up a challenge at Ford with me and very,
very focused on exactly the use case you're talking about. It's impressive. It's impressive.
Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. No, I was, the story I was telling was- Wait a minute. Finish the story
about Dan. Yeah. I mean, he said that's one of the things that in his mind is a pickup truck
is something that you can interact with in that way. He's a big fan of when Ford put steps on
the side of pickup trucks as well. Yeah. You could step on the side and reach in when they're that
tall. But, you know, in the segment that we're talking about, beds and the size of the vehicle
tend to be a little small enough. So, you don't have to put extra cost into a step or anything to
do that. The story I was telling was a friend of mine got a Cybertruck, never had a pickup
truck before. I was like so excited about it. It was so great, so wonderful. And I said,
yeah, you know, I think it's pretty cool. However, it's like, it's really hard to get stuff out of
the bed. He's like, what are you talking about? And I took a water bottle and just rolled it
right against the center of the cab. I'm like, go get it. And he's like, because you're climbing
into a six foot bed that's shrouded by a triangle. It's not just, it is not, Cybertruck is the chief
offender. Yeah. But there are tons of these new hatchback style SUVs where something will roll to
the back. Yeah, you're like, how, especially if it's outside in Michigan and it's been snowing
and there's mud kicked up on the back and you're like, now I got to lean against this thing.
Or again, like, you know, and I had one for a year and it was very enjoyable, but like an F-250,
it's so tall, like, you know, like we had the tallest truck. It's like, okay.
That's when you need the stairs, right? Yeah. Pull it out of the tailgate. Well, yeah, that has
other problems, but yeah, yeah. Okay. I'm thinking about it now though, because that use case of the
water bottle specifically, it's round, so it rolls. Yeah. You know, probably by the end of next
weekend, the software engineers at Tesla are going to update some, something where it tilts the
entire vehicle. You could do that. You know, like, like, I know like anything with air suspension
has the capability. No, just drop the rear, yeah. Bounces a little bit like the Mercedes.
You could. Yeah, you could. Okay. Let's talk about this, the weight piece here. Your colleague,
Vlad, talked a lot about the unit castings, not mega castings, unit castings. 27% casting weight
advantage over our competitors. Pause the video, blow up the fine print. It's 2022 model Y. Okay.
So our model Y, we have one motor from bot one, weighs 4,456 pounds. I don't think you're saying
there's a 27% casting advantage over the total weight. So I wouldn't try to look up the weight
advantage per casting and those, the casting weights for a later model Y, something like 132
pounds for the rear and roughly 286 pounds for the front casting. You're saying you're going to have
a 27% advantage over those two castings. That's right. Okay. So the entire, so the, the combined
weight will be somewhere in the 350 pound range for the castings. I don't know the numbers in
front of me. It sounds roughly, roughly two test numbers. It was 132 for the later and then 286.
Okay. So that's 420. Yeah, 420 pounds. Now, so 27% less. Yeah, about 300 pounds. In the video,
it's confusing. I was watching the video, I was like, man, this thing though, they're these wings.
Sorry. They're these wings that come up on the back of the suspension tower, right? I think.
And they, I was like, it looks like this, the angle of the Cybertruck
top of the bed rails. But what are those, what are those, what's why, why are they flared upwards
towards the front of the vehicle? Two main reasons. Okay. One is it's a unibody pickup
truck and it needs to do truck things. So it needs to be durable. So that means that the most
efficient way to react the loads of the whole thing bending when you're putting heavy stuff
inside of it is by, you know, picking up on the highest, tallest things around it. And the second
is that we're really focused on making the vehicle fun to drive. So to make it fun to drive, you want
to react spring and damper loads to structural elements. So if you look at that, that's a,
that's a direct path from the damper to other structural elements. That means that the dynamics
team can do more tuning with a very rigid thing behind it and make it fun to drive.
And is that, it's a great answer. Is that, that's not, so that's not specifically for
just the truck. That, that those shock towers in the back could conceivably be used for the next
vehicle that comes after a crossover. That's a, that's like a fixed shared part. The rear one is
not a fixed shared part. That is, that is a specific pickup truck. Because you gotta worry
about load leveling in a pickup truck because you put a lot of weight in the back. And so you have
to figure out the geometry. Yeah. And there's a whole bunch of decisions you have to make in a,
in a platform about exactly that. Right. And you can't, and you're probably not going to have
air suspension in a vehicle at this price point. So sounds very expensive. Yeah. So you got to
figure out springs, do is do is geometry and springs. I think what Charles is saying is,
because you're a mechanical engineer that's overkill for the vehicles to come later,
because you wouldn't be expecting to put all the capability, whatever the weight,
the towing that you would need in the back end of the vehicle. Yeah. And the, you know, you're,
it's a bed that's sitting on top of it, right? And so you're trying to get the dampers as far
outboard as possible. The springs as far outboard to make yourself have a bed. You want to put a
forbade sheet of plywood in there. You want to be able to, you know, actually fit those things in a
bed. And then once you have an SUV or you have a sedan or you have a van, your constraints are
a little bit different. So we had to determine, okay, when are we going to constrain ourselves,
scar mass, scar cost, based on the first thing versus not. And it turns out, you know, when you
make large castings like this, you have to buy a bunch of tools or make a lot of tools for these
anyway. And so we went through the cost-benefit analysis and determined that it made sense to do
a specific product form factor for future top hats. Okay. And you said four by eight sheet of
plywood. So the truck will fit a four by eight sheet of plywood in the bed?
That seems like it'd be something our customers would really want a lot.
Tailgate down. Tailgate down sitting on top of the wheel wells or surely it would fit between the
wheel wells? He's smiling. I'm saying nothing. Yeah, I think there's a lot more that we get
to share about. The thing is, number one thing we learned in figuring out who buys a truck like this,
a vehicle like this in general is that very few of them are only doing it because it's the only
thing that they can afford. It's because they see value in it. And you have to, if you want them to
see value in this relative to a gasoline product, you have to give them more than what they would
get in a gasoline product. So that means, you know, we push the occupants around, we've given them
more leg room in the second row, we've done a lot of feature content addition to very carefully
put the money that our customers are going to spend on this product in the places we think
are the most compelling. One last question with bed and arrow. To get great arrow, I've always
heard you have to have a tonneau cover. You have a tonneau cover? So I think the, and I'll speak
for Salim here because he's taught me a lot about this is the answer is if you take a regular pickup
truck, a tonneau cover will make it more efficient. In our case, a tonneau cover would actually
make our aerodynamics slightly worse. Got it. Okay. And that's because, you know, I think you
have to go look at it holistically, test it in a wind tunnel and, you know, where the roof lands
relative to the top of your roof is different. Very, very important. Got it. Yeah. You're being
super modest because your name is on the cyber truck tonneau cover, Pat. You've done a lot of
Googling it. Yes, I have. Okay, we'll get to that. All right. So the acquisition continues.
All right. So we talked a lot about batteries already, which again, was like the fourth part
of this video. The one thing I, one thing caught my ear, you mentioned it.
Universal, oh, God, never lost it. Universal. It's the Ford Universal EV. And you have a
universal production system? Is that like a Toyota production system? Is that like you're
going to trademark that? Or is this something, is it an intro term? Like what is that? Did I
mishear you? You did not mishear me. Okay. So you're talking about Toyota production system,
Ford production system. Actually, interestingly, and yeah, because Johnny was talking about
reading books, I read a book not too long ago, I didn't realize that, and I was reading a book
about the Toyota production system. I didn't realize it was based on the Ford production system
from a long time ago. Optimized. But very changed a lot. Yeah. And on chords, right? Yeah. And on
chords, among many other things related to quality. And so, you know, we still have the Ford
production system. And in fact, we're revitalizing the Ford production system within the company
in a really positive way. But this production system specifically talks more about the hardware
and the methodology for how we assemble the whole vehicle. So, line versus tree?
Line versus tree, exactly. So, if you architect a vehicle in a different way,
and you ultimately end up with a very different solution for how you put it
together. And the way we started thinking about this, you know, three and a half years ago or so,
once we had a somewhat compelling platform concept, we then got manufacturing to come in and we
basically brought in manufacturing as part of our architecture team inside the Skunkworks.
And as we were developing the product, we, you know, thought about all these different
ways of breaking apart the vehicle in a way that allows more surface area. Because that ends
up being the way we assemble vehicles today is kind of silly. You make a tube, you have to convey
it through your factory. So, that means the cost of capital to convey it through your factory is
based on the size of this 3D object that you have to convey through a factory, right? So,
from first principles, you've done a pretty inefficient thing, which has made the largest
thing first, and you have to convey it through your whole factory. The second issue you end up
with is now you've created this thing where you have to stick people or robots inside of it to
try to access all the different things that need to be assembled from harnesses to ECUs, to carpets,
to consoles. Dash panels, all the seats, right? Yeah, okay. So, your dash panel has to fit through
a door. Your seats have to fit through the door. There's wiring harness, right? Dump it in and then
plug it in, yeah. And then, I mean, once your wiring harnesses get so complicated, they're not
malleable anymore. So, in most of our factories, we have ovens, and the ovens have the wiring
harnesses in them, so you can then flexibly put them where they need to go. That's how thick
they've gotten because of how complicated cars are these days. So, you know, when you start thinking
about those as constraints and you say, all right, which of those, if we relieved any of those
constraints, how many stations would you delete in your factory? How much easier would it get for
an operator, like not going over fenders, but instead being able to walk into a front end,
for example? Like, what do you get there? And that's what we used as a guiding principle
for how we wanted to start looking at breaking up the vehicle in a different way.
And with a tree, sorry, sorry, as opposed to a line, that means the vehicle's more stationary,
I don't want to say totally stationary, and then, like, things come down the branches to it.
Was that the idea of a tree? Yeah, so it's three big parts that get subassembled by themselves.
So, if you think about how much, going back to the Ford production system, this is also in the
Toyota production system, like the less inventory you have at any given time, like the less start
to finish, the higher quality your product is, which is not something that's intuitive.
It's not intuitive at all. Yeah, I sort of get it, but I've heard it all my life, yeah.
And so you can imagine, if you can have less in process inventory at any given time,
right now, if you take that tube of a vehicle and start putting one piece on at a time,
you're going to have a really long line based on the number of parts that you're putting in it,
right? But if you can instead say, you know, here's a front end somewhere else that's being
subassembled that has less content, that line shorter, maybe that line doesn't have to go
through the paint process. Same thing with, you know, maybe the large center section that gets
seats and consoles and carpets and all the harnesses loaded on it, doesn't have to go
through all the same processes that, you know, a whole rear end would have to go.
So you've created this whole new tool set. It's a whole new optimization nightmare or opportunity,
depending on how you look at it. We've certainly used this as an opportunity.
So what are the three main parts that you mentioned, three parts coming together? Is it the
batteries one? Batteries one, you got a front end and you got a rear end.
And then the body, you think it was a top hat. That's like the, that's nothing.
It's the part that makes it give the product form that then gives it its capabilities.
But it's not one, it's not, you think of it as a rear end of front end in the middle of the
battery and then the top hat's just a top hat. Top hat's just a top hat.
So then to really break it down, would the battery then come into the universal production system
with the carpet, the seats on top, the probably not the center console and everything? Or is it,
is that, is that the way it's imagined that it would all kind of?
It could. That's the way I would imagine it for sure. And I think, I think the cool thing is,
you know, once we did this, this whole video about efficiency and the platform, you know,
we're really excited to show off the production system, the manufacturing engineers,
all the architects, all the different product system owners that have gone, you know,
that all comes into creating a production system that's going to be, you know, pretty next level.
So we'll get a tour. We'll get a tour of that. I love, I love car factories.
Yes. I think car factories are, it's just like, for me, it's really one because it's,
it's just so magic. It is. And they're all different and they're all cool.
Uh-huh. Yeah. I agree.
Yeah. Awesome.
All right. Let's keep, let's keep cranking here. Um, regarding the Lucas,
how do you say the name? D-Tololo?
D-Tololo.
Oh, okay. You'll, you'll do that one. Lucas's part, all about energy management,
zonal architecture. You went from product, you know, standard cars are 30 ECUs. Now you got
five main modules. I've heard this before. We, Rivian did this whole thing too. They went from
what, 17 to seven, 14 to seven?
17 to seven.
17 to seven.
But then Volkswagen has bought, you know, Rivian's thing and so like on the,
if you're really calling it, but the new Polo, it's ID one, I think, one. It's got one ECU.
Right. Well, which I've heard it might be a step too far.
Yeah. But, but, you know, it's just like, wow.
Some things you want closer to where they're actually at, right?
Yeah. Maybe it was three, maybe it was three, but anyway, it was very low. Yeah.
So it's now a 48 volt system, which allows you to reduce the thickness of the copper,
the wiring in the harness. The harness is now 4,000 feet shorter and 22 pounds lighter.
That'll matter.
Then the first gen, you know, first gen EV harness, which I suspect you picked the biggest one,
lightning, then a four lightning. No.
Mocky.
Mocky.
Mocky. Yeah.
That's what I thought was Mocky.
I thought it was Mocky.
Okay.
Thanks for the credit on that one.
I was like, I'm right this. I'm going to pick the biggest thing,
the heaviest thing you got.
Although, I mean, how much bigger would the lightning be? I mean,
it just was a bigger battery. I think it was more...
I think it scales less by size and more so by feature content. So, you know,
lightning has massaging seats and air conditioned seats and it's got all this other,
you know, electric running boards and...
Right. Oh, yeah. Right.
So, I didn't just try to come with questions of my own. I asked some smart people at work,
like Eric Tingwell, our testing director.
He says, look, UEV is all about optimizing costs and yet it has a 48 volt low voltage
architecture. Surely, that is not the cheapest way to do low voltage or is it?
What is the engineering advantage of doing 48 volts and why should the customer care?
I mean, ideally, the customer shouldn't care other than they look at the purchase price and it's
lower. Okay.
So, that, I mean, that's maybe the car geeks. We really love it. The engineers love it.
So, again, you talked about recruiting tool before. It's an interesting recruiting tool
because once people realize, oh, you're using 48, that's a whole new set of challenges.
It's not rinse and repeat of the last thing. I want to come work on that new thing.
It's helpful for that. I would say that we're going to be really happy if it's
cost parity or slightly lower in cost than our outgoing products in terms of 12 volt.
But within the platform's lifespan, I'm fairly certain that it'll be quite a bit less expensive.
We do a whole bunch of drop downs from, because we're starting at 400,
everything that's stored on board is 400 volts. So, you have to somehow get that down to
LEDs that are using five volts, sensors that are using three volts.
So, there's a lot of stepping down of low voltage that's already happening,
but the distribution is the most amount of copper. It's the most amount of like labor
intensive runs that have to happen. It's the largest size connectors that are in the vehicle as well.
So, ultimately, the system's advantage of lower cost and lower mass is definitely there.
The hardest part is the supply chain part of it, which is just everyone who sells you these end
points, they build their end points in the millions. It doesn't make sense for any individual
automaker to make most of those end points because one production line can or two production lines
can produce enough for the entire market, for example. Right. So, we need those end point
manufacturers to partner with us to go to 48 volt for us to be successful.
Flip side of that though, I noticed you just said it's a 400 volt system, not an 800 volt system.
It's not just a cost thing, a complexity thing. I always thought 800's battery charge faster and
again, recruiting talent like it's the future. Hey, 400 volts, what they were doing in 2011.
Why is that a function of lithium ion phosphate?
It is a lot of different variables. 800 helps you most in charging.
There is a threshold that you drop in terms of weight and duty cycle of the vehicle where
400 makes way more sense than 800 and where does that make more sense? It's really in,
I'd say first of all, if you optimize your powertrain for the location of the charge port,
the high voltage power electronics, the battery where your primary drive unit is that you're
going to drive with, your high voltage cables are so short that when you go to 800 volts,
really their size doesn't matter that much. It gets lighter and smaller, but it's not that
much. Yeah, exactly. But it does make your components inside of those
items that I just mentioned more expensive. So your inverter, for example,
all of the switching electronics that are inside of them for an 800 volt system are more expensive
than a 400 volt system. So you have to say, all right, is it worth it from an efficiency mass
and cost standpoint? And the other part is that inside your battery, each battery cell is a specific
voltage and then once you put them in series and add them up, it has to add to either 400 or 800
volts. And so you really limit yourself, if you say it's 800, then our batteries, for example,
would have to be half the size they are right now. Right. And that'll increase manufacturing costs
and it increases the total cost of the, because your cell itself, you have to make twice as many
of those cells. So even it's the same amount of the chemistry itself, you have twice as many
terminals, you have twice as many vents. It's funny, this is the same answer I got. I was with
Ferrari with the F80, which is a 400 volt battery, which steps down to 48 volt for the dampers.
And I said, why, it's a four million dollar car, like why not just do 800 volts? And they were,
same answer. I don't really understand what they just said, but yes, it was like,
there's no real advantage at that point to 800 volts. And it's like, the thing doesn't plug in,
there's no charging and blah, blah, blah, and it charges fast enough. Back on 40 volt architecture,
you had just, you had already left, but is it really true that Tesla gave, handed everybody,
or sent everybody a guide on how to do the 48 volt architecture? And did you get it? Did you read it?
It is true. I did read it. Is it any good? You know, I asked when they got it,
because I saw an article and I actually emailed Jim Farley to see whether he'd sent us a copy
and he said no. Is it something we would be able to understand, like late people or is it like,
you would be brutally bored by what's inside of it. So yeah, I would say Elon tweeted about it.
I had never seen it. So I looked everywhere in the company. Does it exist? And it didn't exist.
So then we asked someone inside of Tesla, can you help us get in touch with someone who can
give it to us? And they said, we'll send it to you in two weeks. They did send it to us.
Our technical experts looked at it and the outcome was like, okay, yeah, we get what they're
thinking. And this is an interesting starting point. But we were really far along in the 48 volt
work already. And there are standards already that you can use for 48 volt. They were on the
market. So I'd say that nothing was really earth shattering. And I think they've updated it. I
haven't read the updated ones. Maybe they've updated and put more detail in since then.
But yeah, I would say that it was a, it was a somewhat incomplete document that we got.
Hilarious. Okay. Did we miss anything? Cause I just, I kind of put you through the
ringer and then we have, I have a bunch of lightning round questions for you. No pun intended.
From the bounty hunters or just what you're doing. Is there an update? Like how was,
how was your debut presentation received? Like, were you surprised at some of the comments you
saw? I think you guys got a little bit of heat for the truck, the real truck, hardcore truck
enthusiasts are like, oh, but they always like, you know, if it's, if it's, yeah, give me that,
give me my two bucks. I want to say like a barn. Yeah. If it's not a Raptor R, they don't care.
Anything, any surprises post opening up about what you're doing?
The number one surprise I think that I'm getting in general is that, you know, I think
part of the reason why I'm at Ford is to revitalize, you know, our competition globally.
Right. Is there's people who are on the sidelines who are watching us get beaten by the Chinese in
technology, EVs, like we're seeing it in everything from autonomy to humanoid robots,
to EVs, right? Everywhere. So, you know, I'm, I'm here, my whole team is here fighting. Ford is
here fighting. And then Farley is very, Jim Farley is very concerned about China. Like,
this is something he's made very, every time I speak to him, it's very, it's like front of
mind for him. Yeah. And innovation is the only thing that will help us win. Right. And, you know,
you have to take risk to innovate. You have to go fast to innovate. You can't be in a completely
separate effort off to the side. It needs to be directly onto your product with a bunch of people
who are motivated, ready to fail so that they can then fix what they failed and make it work.
So, I think I've been surprised by how many comments there are about people just throwing
stones from the sideline. And I really wish, you know, people will just get in the game,
like come be part of the solution. And, you know, I think where we are as an auto industry right
now, A, it's in, it's super exciting, right? There's so much change from software-defined vehicles
to the powertrain. It's a blast. But also, like, it's very meaningful right now. It's directly
connected to our country's success. So, you know, I wish more people would just get in the game and
start putting their money where their mouth is, putting their work into, you know, us being
successful in developing technology rather than throwing stones. Yeah, no, it's interesting,
because I look around like, you know, and again, it's hard to even call Stalantis American at
this point, but like, yeah, they're just going backwards. But like GM, like, you know, their
EVs are great. And then like, you know, Cadillac is like, they have a full EV lineup, you know,
like they have a tiny little SUV EV. And they go up to the IQ, you know what I mean? So, it's like,
it's, it's interesting that like, two Detroit based companies would just approach things so
differently. And like Ford, like, you know, the Mach-E, great vehicle, it's not perfect as an EV,
it's a great vehicle. Lightning was interesting. Kudos that they got the thing out as quickly as
they did. And that it looked exactly like the regular pickup truck. That's got, that's a huge
win, I think. It was, but they already killed it. So, it didn't work. But in terms of, in terms of
figuring out what the consumer wanted, they did not do a Cybertruck. And they didn't do a Rivian
either. They're like, where are we giving an aerosolik truck? Like, no, that's an F-150.
From 500 feet away, you actually can't tell which F-150 it is, but you should know it's an F-150.
Yeah, I get that. But again, it was decent range, decent capability. Yeah, but it is fast.
Yeah. They're all fast. Super comfortable. But also, it's out of production. So,
you know, it's just interesting. It's like where Ford is, but it's, but we've known that they have
this, you know, Doug Fields unit, this, what was it, the Blue Ford or whatever, they split the company.
Modally. Modally. Modally. Split the company. And, you know, so I'm very excited to actually see this
and the timeframe is like 27? 27, yeah. Like January or December?
We'll get there. We'll get the light around. We'll do the light around. Okay. Okay. So,
let me just summarize what Alan said and you're throwing in there. I think to their, to
Ford's credit, like, got some EVs, some competitive EVs out there. Now, yeah, it took
some big write downs. Like, okay, that strategy didn't work. Not the only one in the business
doing that. But Alan's bigger point, the people who like Poo Poo EVs, and yeah, this is an EV-focused
podcast. So, yes, I'm shilling a little bit for what we're talking about. But it is the most
exciting time in the automotive industry, bar none. Like, I tell people all the time,
we're in California. We got some Vietnamese cars running around on this street. My wife
yesterday said, what's a VinFast? What's a VinFast? Right? I saw two VinFast. We saw Fisker Karma.
We saw the ocean go like this and then like that. Yeah. You know, there's randomly, there are so
many cool vehicles out there and it is, it is like wide open. If you're not excited about this and
it is existential for all these car companies. If you're not excited-
It's a lot of car enthusiasts, it's existential.
Yeah. You're not, you're not a car enthusiast. If you don't like get excited about all this
craziness and then just don't even get me started on ADAS and full self-driving and semi-autonomous
systems because that is going to be the actual biggest thing in our lifetime from, forget the
powertrain side. The fact that you just don't have to drive anymore. As I told my parents,
I'm like, this is bigger than anything you've driven in the last 70 years, guys. And they're
wild. But let's pivot to some lightning round questions because then I want to talk about the
rest of the time about some other stuff you have worked on. So you said, when was the pickup in
27? Great. But hang on, January or December? Middle of the year. Okay. Q2 or 3?
Middle of the year is as granular as I'd like to be. 2 and 3. Okay. Name of the truck and it's
going to be Ranchero, right? It's going to be Ranchero. You guys registered the trademark.
It's Ranchero because you got a Ford, you got the R, you got Raptor, you got Ranger,
plus Maverick's got a hard R in there, Maverick. Ranchero, Ranchero.
It's got, like, it's got some sort of legacy built into it. It's an interesting name. Yes.
Ford Courier. Courier. Ford Courier. That's the van, isn't it? No, no. Ford Courier was a pickup
truck. It was a small pickup truck done in conjunction with Mazda. The fact that you didn't
know it, it's Ranchero. There was a Courier van as well. That's in Europe,
but yes, in the U.S. Courier. Yeah, Ranchero would be good. It's one of those things where like,
anyone who knows what a Ranchero is, that was kind of, you know, had a sort of a negative
connotation. They're dead, so it's probably a fine name. Garbage. Do you have any good names?
Me? Any good ideas? Rancheros. Carry all out. You like Ranchero?
Yeah, I like that Ford is a legacy car brand, so it should lean on legacy brands. And then you
probably have some cool chrome badging with like a scripty kind of R that you could do with
lassos or something. I don't know. I'm caught up, Gar. I can think of some. I can't think of anything
right now. You're kicking it off. What's the Australian ute? Falcon. Falcon. F. You guys like
Fs. Well, Ford loved E's for a really long time. But it was the trucks, you know, F-150s or Falcon.
You want to talk about volumes? I mean, this is the first one out of the gate and you saw a lot
of trucks. Do you have any volume targets you want to talk about? Not that I want to talk about,
but I do want to say that volume is very important because economies of scale equal low cost really
is, you know, I think a lot of the supply, like the tier one suppliers won't wake up for
numbers below a certain amount. They don't really want to work on projects that aren't
high enough volume that they can, you know, efficiently run production. And it's the same
thing. You know, we were building this at Louisville, Kentucky at the plant there in Louisville,
and that was making escapes and coarse air. So you can kind of do the math of what the capabilities
of the whole factory. But as you can imagine, the UED platform could build also then multiple
top hats on top of it. So I think that's the important part too is that not everyone's going
to want to pick up truck. There's going to have to be other top hats after that. And the escape,
I mean, I don't know the exact numbers, but it was always like, you know, behind RAV4 and kind of
maybe a little bit behind CRV. So it's probably like that factory could do 300,000 units a year
easily. I believe that was what you could Google it. But that was like, you know, escape productions
about that. That's a lot. Globally competitive vehicle. Is this North American primarily,
or are you going to try to sell this Ranchero against the Hilux or against the BYD shark,
or like how like elbows out through this car to the, you know, this truck, sorry,
for the rest of the world? What's the strategy? Our goal is to give the business the capability
to deploy it anywhere Ford wants to deploy it. And that means thinking about every global regulation
and making sure that the platform can address all those global regulations and the capability.
And then, you know, North America is our focus to start off with. And that means it's really
easy to turn on any international markets later. Inclusive of China? I think right now the market
conditions in China are very, they're very challenging because of how much each individual
car company is propped up by multiple layers of subsidies. It's very anti-non-Chinese vehicle at
the moment. Yeah. So I imagine that it wouldn't be very successful if we tried to go to China.
You think you would be price competitive in China or impossible?
You can't be price competitive in China unless you make it in China.
Which is why, yeah. But I mean, the truck is, it's a little bit of a gotcha too because
trucks are sort of illegal in China. At least you can't, my understanding is in the tier one
cities, you can't drive an F1 like a full-size pickup truck except like between the hours like
2 a.m. and 6 a.m. because it's considered a commercial vehicle. Like it's delivery only
then get out. Which I was like, huh. But I don't know whether that would apply to a small pickup
truck, but they're not showing a lot of that stuff. Yeah. Americans like pickup trucks the rest of the
world. Well, there's actually a huge market. There's a ton of green market raptors in China.
They love it. Yeah. A ton is relative. I mean, you know, like Ford sells a million pickup trucks,
GM sells a million pickup trucks like, you know. Broncos too. Yeah. They like Broncos a lot there.
Speaking of, so Ford is a multi-power train brand with gas hybrid and EV customers. Is what you're
doing in Long Beach and Silicon Valley applicable? Are you building this for use in
non-EV power trains? Will there be, I mean, it's, I think the answer is in Ford universal EV
platform, but could we expect any of the learnings for other parts of the Ford business?
So I think Pheves, EREVs, hybrids, I consider them EVs, types of EVs that have multiple power
trains. Right now we're hyper focused on EVs. And part of that is because I think the only way to
be successful in creating an entirely new software and electrical platform is by focusing. And we
have a gift. That's like the number one gift probably that the leadership of Ford has given us
is that we're hyper focused on one set of power trains, one platform, and the rest of Ford doesn't
have that benefit. They're looking at every power train, every product form all at the same time.
And so any changes means, okay, you want to do this because it's better here. Okay, check the
entire lineup if it works for that as well. So I think what ultimately then will happen is that
first, ideas from the platform or proliferate into other Ford products, those that don't really need
gutting the entire baseline of what it is. And then the second thing could be like the unit casting.
For sure. Yeah. Yeah. Or it could be, you know, other ECUs. It could be stuff. Yeah. And one of the
examples I've given, for example, is for an EV, you have to design an entirely new charge port.
We've made our charge port pretty unique in terms of what its capabilities are. So if you're doing a
UEV team, can we use your charge port? So stuff like that, I think we'll start to pick up steam
as it gets into serious production. Yeah. Yeah. Because you don't want to run into like what I'm
hearing about like, you know, what's happening with Scout right now, where it's like, it sounds
like they've been delayed a year because they announced they're going to do, you know, an EV and
an EREV without changing the design at all before they designed, engineered the EREV. And now they've
like pushed it back silently, pushed it back a year, because they can't figure it out, because
they want to have a frunk. But then where do you put the engine? And like, how do you put an engine
under the back of an SUV with ground clearance? Do you get delayed with something? I'm surprised.
I just, why would they have bothered with the EREV? Just make it a good EV. But that's me. That's me.
Tesla's famous for reducing model variation. They would just have a handful of vehicles like
Standard, right? Long range or performance. There's no XL XLT Larry at limited colors
with tons of different bed combos. There's also, like with Cybertruck, you can have it any color
you like as long as the stainless steel, which is a riff on the Model T. Are you going to be
deploying similar tactics to keep this the cost down? Is it going to be like a mono spec or
limited spec or like single color, something wild like that? Like Elon's famously said,
paint shop, one paint shop, $200 million. Let's get rid of it or whatever. Do the whole thing in
stainless. Is that on the menu? Is reducing options, optionality, or are you going to deliver
the same sort of Ford experience that people know? It's not the same Ford experience that people know,
but it's not the extreme of no choices that we see from other startups. But there are very
concrete levers that what you just described are created by limiting number of paint colors,
limiting the amount of option content. So if you want to make a sub $40,000 vehicle,
it ultimately needs to have some of those trade-offs. So we need to understand our customer
really, really well. But I do also think that it's important to give the variability in the
places that customers actually think matter. And so that's been a big focus is how do we not
create factory complexity while also creating feature content that our customers want,
but they don't necessarily want to pay for and they don't, not every customer wants it,
only some want it. But I mean, part of Ford trucks, I mean, Ford figured out like you needed an
off-road variant between FX4 and Raptor. You know what I mean? Like it's just a slice of that pie
thinner and thinner and thinner with different trim lines or whatever it's called.
Like you will, you know, there'll be a tremor, whatever, Ranchero. I mean, you know,
eventually, right? Ranchero Raptor. I have a hypothesis for why that exists. And it's related
to the dynamics between the leadership teams and marketing and all the dealers and the way that
works is, you know, okay, this is the size of the pie that we have today. And then, you know,
if we add this new trim, these are the new customers we would get in. Sure. And so it creates,
you know, you can actually use data, use clinics, use many different methods of saying like, I'm
going to get 1% more customers, 1% more, and then you just keep adding, and then you have 7,000
different product lines. We're on the opposite end of that, right? If you have like what other
mid-size electric pickup truck will exist in 2027. So as a consumer, you have very little choice.
And so you're just going to say, okay, well, these are the things that do matter to me. And as
long as we understand what those are and create that set of choices, you know, we don't need FX4,
we don't need Raptor. So you're saying with market maturity, that'll add the trim levels. But
trim levels. That's right. Okay. Well, you open the door for this. You said there's no other
mid-size EVs. Have you been looking at all at Slate or Tello? Have you been tracking or like
curious about these little EV, tiny EV startup pickup trucks? Yeah, I'm super excited about
all of the different variants of different trucks that are going to exist at the time. Yeah.
Okay. Anything, does the Amazon backing or the modularity of the Slate give you any,
also that it's an anagram for Tesla? You know, Slate, if you give you any pause,
I think there's some former Tesla people there, right? A lot. Yeah, a lot. Are you like me?
You're a really nice guy. I'm sure you're. I think it's super cool what they're doing. And
I'm excited to drive one. I'm excited to check them out in person. Yeah.
Let me, this is the last one of the lighting room. I want to talk about some other stuff after
this. When your former colleagues at Tesla or somebody like Sandy Monroe tears down your Ford
Universal EV pickup truck, what are they going to learn? Does Tesla tear down competitive?
They don't even care. Do they? Yeah, they do. They definitely do. They definitely do. Yeah,
I think, yeah, you can't stick your fingers in your ear and you need to. You can't? Yeah. I mean,
I think and be competitive. No, you cannot. And I think also, certainly when Tesla started in the
Model S days and the Roadster days, there was no benchmarks. There was nothing to tear down,
really. And things have changed, right? There's, and so I think it's nice to look at the
radical solutions that exist, especially. There's a bunch of radical cost solutions that come from
China. There's a bunch of radical performance solutions that come from Europe. So, yeah, so
what will Sandy Monroe and other benchmark can tear down? Hopefully, I mean, hopefully,
they'll find some Easter eggs. They'll find some stuff that we've hidden in there for them.
They're going to get a bunch of head scratchers, I think, is like, why would they do it this way?
You know, this is more expensive or where do these parts exist? They're not even here.
And they're not going to be able to easily answer it. And they're going to have to go back
to the drawing board and look at, okay, if you get all these three, five, six, seven,
12 parts together, and you think about the functions that they're doing, this is why they
did it that way. And I think, you know, there's going to be quite a bit of that, I'd imagine,
if we did our jobs properly. Like, chortle with Geely when you first see these reports.
You guys got it wrong. Well, I think the important part, and people have asked us
constantly. So, you know, you've innovated in all these different ways. You've changed the
product form. You've changed the way that the power train exists within the EV platform.
What's next? Like, we just can't stop. We have to keep innovating. We have to keep coming off
with new ideas. Because if we stop, everyone's just going to copy us, and then we won't have a
competitive advantage. Right. Oh, I like that. All right. We have a ratio of the coals on this
board stuff. Let's get to know you personally. Also, let's give a shout out to our mutual friend,
Lisa Chai. Hi, Lisa. So, I'm sure she probably has not made it this far. She's your neighbor.
She's a friend of a friend of mine. And we send Instagram stories back and forth of silly design
things that we look at. You see Davis, mechanical engineer. I'm going to guess it's not on your
LinkedIn. You graduated around 2006? 2008. Oh, 2008. Look at young guy. Holy smokes.
We've wasted our lives. First, and he's loaded. Oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah.
He got Tesla stock at 2009. Give me a break. Okay. Yeah. You were, he had Honda F1 as an intern.
Where were they? How would you intern two month internship? Like where? What was that?
Said, Brackley was in the UK. Yeah. I'm kidding. Yeah. That was an incredible experience being able
to go through. And I worked in every department there for a week at a time. And that was V10s.
Sort of a rotation programs. Yeah, that was 2006. It was the year right after BAR. Oh, yeah.
It was Jensen and Rubens in that year. And yeah, I learned so much in such a short amount of time,
including that I should have known at the time that like racing wasn't for me.
Because of your height? Well, yeah, certainly. Yeah. I stick to driving things with 10 tops
rather than open wheel. What do you mean racing not for you?
In terms of, I think even at that time, I was, I didn't know it yet, but it was very specialized
and siloed and very rules based. So you're competing with physics and the rules and you get
to be really creative within those. But I started to realize that the actual value that you're
creating is, it's pretty expensive advertising space on the side of the car. And I cared about it
deeply. And when you talk to people about it, the first thing they'd ask if you're in racing is,
wait, do you drive? You get to drive the car? No, I do something way cooler. I'm an engineer.
Like I'm one of the team that makes it faster and then they lose interest and walk away.
Right. So I shaved two grams off of that. That's right.
Okay. Yeah. Let me, sorry, let me jump back. Where'd you grow up?
I grew, I was born in the Bay Area. I lived in New Jersey for about 10 years and then I moved back
to the Bay Area. For college, for high school or for college? I know for college, but for prior
to college. For high school. Yeah. For high school. Very cool. Well, you didn't kick the racing bug
immediately because then you did, you worked for the, for HPD, 100 Performance Development,
and you did the Acura, the ARX, their first, is that their first LMP car?
It's the first LMP one car, second LMP car, right? Because there was the Karash chassis
LMP two before that. And you did this, like the steering wheel? I did a bunch of stuff on that.
I got to work on the steering wheel. I got to work on a lot of the chassis installation,
kinematics, compliance testing, six posts, seven posts, super fun development activity.
We had a tiny chassis team spread between Connecticut, Ohio, and then the main chassis
team was mostly in the UK. Right. So at the time, the idea was, hey, let's start our own
chassis team. And I think that was number five. So start up within the, within the organization,
like, hey, let's start a chassis team. And I think that quickly as 2009 rolled around
and funding stopped, that quickly became a, hey, go make money in racing, which
we know the best way to make a small fortune in racing. Yes, I've done some racing.
So what, at this point in your career, like, what is your, what's your, what's your keen,
what's your interest? Like, is it, is it composites? You see, you have a lot of
sort of, I think composite. Back then. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, just going faster, composites.
I started to get into electronics. We were doing some, some funky electronic stuff for
Le Mans at the time. We had big issues with, you know, restarting cars at pit stops when they're
hot. Yeah. And I think that's the steering wheel project was a great one where I worked with
some much more experienced engineers packaging electronics and things. And it was huge. There
there was a great connection between, you know, HMI human interface and, you know, had a PlayStation
screen on it from a PlayStation portable and had all these knobs and switches. And
yeah, I played a really tiny part in that, but it was great to learn. I just absorbed as much as I
could from that. Okay. And then you went to this place called Two Bennett Audi motive. Is it Audi?
Yeah. So other way around. So really, really lucky. My first car was an Audi 5000.
Yeah. Front wheel drive, five cylinder, nice 10 valve. And so that gave me this like five cylinder
bug. And, you know, something about the harmonics of five cells, 10, 10 cylinders that, you know,
get my heart going a little bit faster. Yeah. So after that, I really got into
a car called the Coop Quattro, which is just, you know, posters everywhere, got me into Euro
Tuner magazine. And that was still in college or Coop Quattro. So or Coop Quattro, even better.
Yeah. I certainly couldn't afford those even back then. It was going for like $15,000, $20,000
at the time. Don't look at them now. Yeah. You have a article written about you and Euro
Tuner. Are you getting into reading Euro Tuner? Yeah. So yeah, I got to work on a bunch of stuff
that ended up in it at Two Bennett. But yeah, that's when I got a Coop Quattro. It was a 91.
You know, they only made a few of them for the US market. It was called an S2 in Europe.
And I walked into this place called Two Bennett. And the first thing that happened is this guy
comes out in a wheelchair and, you know, his name is Ken Bennett. He ended up driving this crazy
hand-controlled B5 S4 super badass car. And I said, hey, you know, I just got this car. I'm
trying to make it get a new exhaust for it. It's only made by this one company that they make Lotus,
Ferrari, Lamborghini and Coop Quattro exhausts. And he said, I've got one in the rafters. If you
can go up and get it, you can have it. Just bring me the one when they ship yours to you.
And that started a relationship where, you know, I'd go do composites for them. I would go do
steering wheels because all of his stuff was hand controls. And I learned a lot about working
with my hands and building composites at a low budget. So that was blessed.
How did you go from there to Tesla?
So when I was at Honda, I got a call from a recruiter and Tesla was moving their offices
because they tried to create a new product that was going to be a sedan. They had an office in
Rochester Hills, Michigan. And Elon had hired a guy named Peter Rawlinson to start that team.
We know Peter. He was on the podcast. We know Peter.
And yeah, so, you know, Peter decided to move, Peter and Elon, I guess,
decided to move the office from Rochester Hills to SpaceX in Southern California. So he gave me
a call and said, you know, we're looking for engineers. Come, come chat. So this is Peter called
the recruiter called me. My interview was with Peter. Then the next week I interviewed with
Elon. And then I later found out that that Peter was a big advocate for me, thought that I would
grow within the organization well. And then Elon was sort of on the fence about whether
he wanted to hire me or not. And then because Peter stuck up for me, he brought and brought me in.
And then so I was, I think I was number 15 or 20 in that office. It was tiny.
Wow. There's about 200 people at the company at the time. Right. A lot of contractors,
a lot of people in England still at that point because we were just building the Roadster.
Right. Which was Lotus Base, which is who? So, sorry, Tesla Hawthorne. Tesla's little carve out
within the SpaceX campus at Hawthorne. Was Franz there yet?
Franz was definitely there. Here's, here's our before me. Yeah. He was in a little tent in the
back. Yeah. Franz was like two or something of Elon's hired. Did you work with Ali Javedon?
Yeah. Okay. He helped build the White Star way. He tells me he helped actually like take the
Mercedes CLS. CLS is a part. Yeah. Okay. So you guys were like, working out of the same facility?
So he was in San Carlos. That's where I was going back and forth between there and San Carlos. But
the sedan team was originally built in Southern California. Right. And then eventually when
Noomi came on. The Fremont facility used to be Noomi, Toyota, and GM.
That's when Elon moved the entire vehicle engineering team up there. Right.
How are you getting back up and forth, back and forth to San Carlos? Were you flying on the jet?
Only a few times. And you know, that came with the year on the hot seat because there's not
that many seats. And that means you're sitting across from Elon the whole time and answering
questions. Yeah. It can be good. Sure. Yeah. Mostly Southwest. Southwest airlines.
Lots of points there. Right. All right. So you did, your name is on the
patent for the pop out door handles for the Model S. That's correct? Yep. There's a lot of sleepless
nights, a lot of work on that one. Yeah. Including like busting through like you guys tested with
icing it over and seeing whether it would come out during like a frozen Michigan evening.
A bunch of really smart closures engineers worked on and software engineers and electrical
engineers worked on exactly that. Yes. So when you say you, it makes me uncomfortable because
I did parts of it, but you know, super talented team doing that kind of thing. So my claim to
fame on that one was sitting next to Peter Rawlinson at, I don't know, four in the morning
and us having a light bulb moment at the same time around the actual way that the
mechanism would allow it to come out, which is, you know, it's an interesting mechanism
if you've ever taken one apart. I've not. How do you feel about them going away?
Now that China is mandating, right, that all door handles for future cars have to have mechanical,
be mechanical. I don't know exactly the terminology, but also have a carve out
for the hand. Like you actually need like, like make like, like an old school Mercedes,
like a grab handle type setup. And I feel like because China's mandating it,
so goes the rest of the world. Everyone's going to think, well, we're not going to build two.
We're not going to build different types of door handles. We're going to try to be, you know,
let it climb to scale. You have any, and the related question is, does this influence,
does that regulation, because I feel like it's coming to the US, it influenced the way that
your F4 UEV door handles are going to work? Yeah, I mean, I think we're really focused on
giving our customers something that's intuitive and safe. And I think you can make a pop out door
handle intuitive and safe. So I think the regulations, the way that they're written,
are quite prescriptive and don't take into account other levels of redundancy in the low
so it hasn't really changed our direction. We're already, we're really focused on like,
when you want, when you walk up to the vehicle, you should know how to open the door.
And that means that it needs to be accessible and it needs to be easily understandable. So
you get into some Ubers, they still have stickers pointing to where even a
Tesla door handle is. And so yeah, it turns out that at scale, you have to reeducate a lot of
people how to open doors for when you use interesting door handles. And I think that's
sort of given the entire industry agency to try many different things. So I'm glad that we've had
many different iterations of what door handles are, but it seems like we're going to settle
back down to some some more standard door handles now. Is there a massive aero savings
with flush with the flush door handles? I'll model that.
No. Yeah, that's what I always, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, yeah. Small aero savings,
but it's just like every gram, right? It all adds up. Right. But also, you could, I would say,
well, okay, it's a whole, but you could do stuff, you know, a knack of duck, you could
cool something or do something with it, you know. Sure. Yeah. Okay. What about the Mach E
door handles? Would you say the path you're on with UEV is going to reject like the little,
what do you call it? It's like a little thing. We call it a winglet.
Winglet. Yeah. Was that not a particularly intuitive door opening process? The Mach E winglet?
That was before his time. It was before my time. And I think when you put a winglet
with an electrical actuator, you then have to deal with the ice breaker situation.
If you don't have something that's really big to pull on, you can't break the ice that's frozen
over your whole door. Right. And so, you know, you basically, you create another device that you
have to add in to break that ice. Someone was saying this to me yesterday. Actually, they said,
I was asking, do you like the Mach E door handle? And they said, I have to explain to people
that the button is not a camera and you, it's okay to press the little camera looking button.
It looks like a camera. That's right. I never really thought about that,
but it does kind of look like a camera. Yeah. Right. Okay. All right. Solid.
You worked on Model X prototype and you have a question here. I have so many Model X questions.
I've heard so many things. All right. Well, my two things are like the Falcon doors,
like how much did the Falcon doors delay Model X coming out?
And like when you've heard about it, we were like, we're age you personally.
Yeah. Definitely age me personally. Many experiences of that company age me a bit.
But like, tell us about the Falcon doors.
Yeah. So the delay question, I don't know the exact number, but definitely more than six months.
Yeah. Okay. And I'd say, you know, the seats were very complicated as well.
I heard that the middle seats, the single post seats was actually more complicated,
engineering wise than the doors, which people... Or delay it more.
That's what the seats people told you. And then the door people said.
But it is really hard because you had to make these things on one post pass a crash test.
And I mean, that was, that was, I heard, and I also heard that added
500 pounds to the vehicle because you had to really reinforce the floor way more than
any other car ever made. I mean, the way that's influenced me a lot is,
you know, there's some really well renowned designers who they talk a lot about
making things look good in real life. Like you could make a box or a cube or whatever else.
And, you know, if they're working on appliances or they're working on cars,
they want to leave something beautiful behind. There's a fine line between that
and, you know, creating really, really hard challenges for engineers that could be
spending time on other things. And one, you know, one of the best examples I have of that
is the auto wipers on a Tesla is, you know, that's a $3 sensor you can put in there,
or you can put some of the best machine learning engineers in the world
for five years to try to make it work. And then it kind of works. And that's your choice. Do you
want a $3 sensor or all those engineers busy for a long time? Right. But the seats, I heard,
again, I don't think he was a seat person, but the person who told me this just said like,
apparently it was Elon has large feet and didn't like sitting in the third row. And so just wanted
one post. And that was the reason why, which is insane, because adults don't go in third rows
and like, what, you know, like, yeah, is that true? Is that, I mean, I think that's a fundamental,
like better point of those seats. So I don't remember him specifically guiding that, but I know
he definitely wanted the, I don't know why, but he wanted the, you know, monopost seats.
Yeah. But it just seems like insane. If you think about a crash test and like,
it's hard thing on a post is really like, and then it has to move, you know, forwards and
backwards, yeah, 300, 400 millimeters as well. And then you have to close the gaps that it's
traveling through because now your post gets bigger and bigger and bigger. And then, you know,
there's the crazy accordion thing that has to open and close in front of it and behind it.
Right. I think you see the key learning though, in the model three and the model Y. Yeah. Why
doesn't do any of that? In fact, when they designed the seat structure for from the three to the Y,
all I did was they made it go up. They're like, we're going to use the exact same thing. We're
just going to put little risers in the floor to make it go up. We're not going to do any of this
monkey business. So let's keep going. Battery, this one is near and dear to my heart because I
went to the demo at the battery swap station at Harris Ranch. You devoted like two years of your
life between the battery fast swap machine and then the station in Harris Ranch to building
this thing. And then it never went into production. Come on. You got to feel some, what's the feeling
in the chest about that? Like, man, I made a lot of drives with the five to this thing that never
happened. And then China's doing it. Have you done a neo battery swap yet? Yes, it's very impressive.
And years later. Yeah. Here's the thing. For some reason, I have this rude personality trait where
wasted work in the right way doesn't bother me, but wasted work for no purpose bothers me a lot.
So if I have to do the same thing twice, it really hurts me. I'm with you. But if I see
something that I worked on and I learned a lot and I learned that it was a bad idea, I'm not
perturbed at all. And I think battery swap was a fantastic example of that is, you know, we had to
take it really far to really understand the complexity of what it would take to, I mean,
a vehicle is already designed for it, right? Model S and X can both fast swap their batteries
already. And the hard part was logistically keeping track of somebody's private battery.
That became the, that was charging and out of a vehicle and having to run coolant through it
still moving it in and out of a pit in Harris Ranch and because they're heavy, very heavy.
And if you drop them, bad things happen. And so the infrastructure for it is
expensive. So I think some of the other models where you don't own the battery and maybe it
makes a little bit more sense. But at least from what we learned, it's not viable for the
distances we travel. So the real died in the world Elon haters, I'm going to say Tesla haters,
but Elon haters, they were like, oh, this was just a tax scam because California gave Tesla money
to develop this battery swap station. Like they actually installed a battery swap station,
they get a tax break or something or getting more funding or something. And I was always like,
that's crazy. They're almost conspiracy theorists. Was that ever part of your brief,
like we need to do this to get a tax break? Or is that just apocrypha?
I mean, we never really talked about that when we were working on the project. It was a really
the crazy thing we always talked about though, is which gasoline
car company was ever forced to install their own fuel stations. And yet Tesla was basically
saying you can fast, fast refuel this thing, which is the terminology that was in the regulations,
you can fast, you can battery swap if you want to the third, the aftermarket will figure out a
way to do it. We've given them all the tools with coolant and high voltage and low voltage
quick connects that they can fast swap very quickly. But, you know, I think Elon went to
really great lengths to make sure that we actually made it possible and deployed in the field and
got data and it worked. Right. So that's what I was, I mean, sorry. There was that Niedermeyer guy,
Ed Niedermeyer, he famously just trashes Elon for a living. And I used to work with him. But
that was his thing was, you know, it was always a scam. And my take was like, well,
but it worked. Like, like if it didn't work, maybe you could say it's a scam, but it actually
worked. And it was like, it was like four screws and the battery comes out or
it's more than that. There's a lot of 90 seconds out. Right. It was very fast to come out and then
a new one and see your screen, you know, there was a pilot that the Tesla ran and there was
quite a few people who were in there. So, you know, lots of people actually did it. Go. Yeah.
I would tell him, go find those people who actually did it and then ask them if it's a scam.
So, you've done the battery swap with Neo and you must kick, I mean, it works really well. I've
done it a few times. Are you, is it the same? Did they just, how does it work? Because you
guys patented that, right? Or did they just, is it this, as far as you can tell, like your setup or
it's, there's multiple ways to do this, Ed. There's tons. Yeah. There's a big difference between
design and utility patents, obviously. Also, it's a different country. So, I don't even know if Tesla
patented all that stuff in China, not that they care. Okay. All right. Let's do, like,
just blow through the rest of this. You'd worked on, time is up, Model 3 prototypes,
you led the engineering effort, early architecture work, product definition.
Also, you did the Roadster, the second one. When is that one coming? Do you have any idea,
any updates? By the way, you were working on it in 17, right? 2017? Yes, you're just right.
It's 2026. Still in space? Math is not my thing, but we're getting on doing decade.
My claim to fame, you mentioned the space one. I was the last human on earth to drive the one that
went to space. Oh, nice. I drove it onto the lift so that we could drop all the guts out of it. Oh,
that's cool. All right. And then Model Y, you help with the architecture, product definition,
student engineering, great. I'm just noticing in your LinkedIn profile, and you're probably
gonna update this after this call. When we talk about Tesla Cybertruck, it's just like
prototype. You don't list anything. Was that a highlight working on the Cybertruck,
or did you learn a lot? Any fun stories? We visited. Were you there when we visited?
Did I see you there? Sorry. I was busy with all the people I was bringing and trying to make sure
we did. There was a lot of people. Yeah. That was the first time Elon ever brought
an external party in to see a product before it was released.
Yes. And we gave a lot of notes, I feel like. Okay. What was that like? What was I working
on Cybertruck? I think every product I worked on at Tesla, I felt like as an engineering
organization, as a product organization, we were getting better and better and better.
Cybertruck was the first time where I didn't, I feel like I was learning a lot personally,
but I wasn't as proud about what I was working on. For what reason?
I don't really aesthetically like this. I really like the fact that Cybertruck is different,
and I love the technology underneath it. So many smart engineers in software,
electrical, hardware domains working on that thing. But yeah, I wasn't a fan of the product form.
For me, product form has to at least loosely follow function. I'm certainly of the
mindset that when you engineer something really well, it ends up becoming beautiful.
Versus the other way around, which is come from the, I want it to look like this,
figure out a way to fit the guts inside of it. Again, to me, the shape of the Cybertruck
hurts it as a truck. It screws up with the bed, and it screws up with the front.
Because of that slope, you just have this, again, in Tesla's, they're the front leaders,
that's what they're known for. And you look at a lightning front, or you're riveting,
like super useful. And then the Cybertruck one's almost an afterthought. And it's all because
of the design. So yeah. Okay. You know, I wish I could go out for another hour, but I won't.
I want to get back to X. We actually have worked, you've been a friend of Motor Trend for a long
time. In fact, I think you were on site during our very first testing of, well, you weren't there
for Roadster, but you were there for Model S when we did both instrumented testing, and
both range tests. I think we went to San Diego, and then I did the run. I was part of the team
that drove the car back from Las Vegas. And when we went into the CES, you showed me that you kept
the picture. You took a picture of the Polaroid, it was my Polaroid camera, when we pulled it back
to 831 South Douglas Street. And you were basically the support guy, right? You were the engineer
supporting our testing of the vehicle. Oh, I have a question. Oh, that's your question. So
very famously, I think on the El Segundo to San Diego and back, they came up like two miles short
and quite make it. But apparently at one point, they were getting ready and to exit. We were
northbound on PCH. I think we're about either five miles from the office, and there was three
miles of range showing, or three miles from the office, one mile of range showing. Something
like that. And we had asked, I think specifically before we did the range test, does the remaining
miles mean the car will stop at zero, or is there a reserve? Is there a reserve? And you guys are
like, zero is zero. But anyway, so as this is happening, there's an SMS message from the car
saying, keep going. No, that was different. That was the Vegas road. Okay, whatever it was. But
did you send that? I did not send that. No. Because somebody, some engineer said,
like, don't give up. The story I heard is that you guys... I feel like it was Kim and Benson
coming back from San Diego. No, that they were watching, and they said they knew where we were
trying to go, and they knew the range. And when Kim made a turn left to go pull into some, there
was no charger infrastructure at the time. It was like some weird slow charger that was available,
like the entire room you guys were in was like, no, you could have made it.
That's the story. I heard they got a text like, keep going. That was the Vegas road.
I wasn't in the room, apparently. So I think I was in that case. And why I came to collect the
vehicle and support it is that, like I said, Tesla moved all their vehicle engineering up north.
And so there was an idea, why don't we keep a small architecture team here in Southern
California and make it directly next to Franz's team design. And so I stayed down here. So pretty
consistently, it would be, hey, we have some test vehicles in Southern California. Me or my team
would go support that. Got it. And yeah, very small team at the time. So it was, you know,
send that guy over to Motor Trend to pick it up. Right, right, right. All right.
Well, I talked to you for hours. There's a bunch of stuff I didn't get a chance to ask you about,
but we didn't tell you we were going to keep you this long. One last question.
One last question, since you worked on both, like, you know, Model S and Model X, like,
there's no second act. They're dead. How do you personally, how does that strike you?
How do you feel that Model S is done? That's a great question. I forgot to ask.
Thank you, Ed. Yeah, it hurts. Yeah, it does. Yeah. I mean, that was, as an engineer, as lap
being early in my career as well. So yeah, certainly when we started that product, it was
this time we were in a Kubota tractor building outside of SpaceX, like relegated to this corner.
We built up to like 100 people. At the time, my wife was a nurse and she worked nights.
And because she worked nights, she would sleep during the day. That means I could work 24 hours
a day and she wouldn't be annoyed. Right. And you probably did. And I was averaging,
like, 18 hours a day, six days. And I loved every minute of it. I'm not complaining even a little
bit. So, like, right career time for me, right, you know, sort of personal life circumstances
to allow me to do that. And I had no kids, I'm assuming. No kids at the time. It was a blast.
Yeah, yeah. And so, like, for all of those things to align all at the same time for me,
personally, was amazing. And so, to watch, like, the fruit of that that's been cultivated by many
people over many years kind of die is sad. It's really sad. I sort of, I don't want to say
sob coming, but I thought, but, like, we asked for, we had fronds on, like, two years ago at this
point. And I said three. And I said, like, or we asked, when's the, you know, 2.0, like,
getting old, like, still a nice looking, you know, model that you got there fronds, but, like,
you know, and he was just like, no, no plans, no plans. And I remember thinking, like, oh,
that's really weird. Like, well, it makes sense. There's nobody, no one buying the big sit-ants.
Well, but, but because you these people are buying, you know, and so it's 2017 when we did
zero to 60 in 1.9 seconds in a roadster. And then a year and a half, two years later,
plaid came out, and a sedan could do that. So there's even maybe more of an argument that
the sedan is what should be kept and not, you know, the roadster.
Sure. I'm sad too. I mean, I'm not that I'm, again, I'm not going to lose that much sleep over,
but, you know, we're going to try to do something with the last, the last one that comes off the
line, but that's for a future conversation. That's cool. Last question for me. What personal
car? What's your fun car? Do you have anything that you drive for fun?
My number one fun car, because I like to track as much as I possibly can whenever I can get away
from the family and have find some free time is a 2015 991 GT3. Yeah. All right. There you go.
Yeah. 2015 is the 991.1. Yeah. So, okay. Oh, PDK only. PDK only. That's the way to go.
It really is. Well, actually, the manual is really good on track too. Well, that's what happens
when you work it. When you work it as a, yeah, right. That's how you reward yourself. All right.
We got to go. Thank you so much for all the time and the Inquisition. I appreciate it. We'd like to
have you on again when we get another update on the Ford. We drive it. Let's go drive it.
Yeah. Let's do that. Sounds like fun. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.
About this episode
Allen Clark, Ford's Executive Director of Advanced EV Development and former Tesla engineer, shares insights on leading Ford's new universal EV platform. He discusses his transition from Tesla to Ford, motivated by the desire to create meaningful change and build affordable, exciting electric vehicles. The conversation covers the strategic move to Long Beach for talent access, the challenges of EV development, and the influence of industry veterans like Doug Field. Clark also reflects on his early Tesla projects and the evolving EV landscape, highlighting Ford's commitment to innovation and practical vehicle production.
Advanced EV Development
autonomy
battery prices
battery size
CDA
CFD
ECU
electric vehicles (EVs)
EV
Ford Motor Company
Audi 5000
Audi Quattro
BMW M3
Byd Shark 6
Ford F-150
Ford F-150 Lightning
Ford Falcon
Ford Maverick
Ford Model T
Ford Mustang
Ford Ranchero
Ford Ranger
Geo Prism
Honda CR-V
Honda Ridgeline
Hyundai Santa Cruz
Hyundai Santa Fe
Lucid Air
Maserati MC20
Mercedes-Benz CLS
Mercedes-Benz EQS
Porsche Taycan
Renault Wind
Rivian R1T
Rolls-Royce Ghost
Tesla Cybertruck
Tesla Model 3
Tesla Model S
Tesla Model X
Tesla Model Y
Tesla Roadster
Toyota Corolla
Toyota Hilux
Toyota Prius
Toyota RAV4
Toyota Supra
Original notes
Alan Clarke spent over a decade at Tesla — working on Model S, Model X, Model 3, Model Y, Cybertruck, and even Tesla’s battery swap program. Now he’s Ford’s Executive Director of Advanced EV Development — leading the Ford Universal EV Platform and the upcoming affordable midsize electric pickup targeting ~$30,000 and 300 miles of range.
The InEVitable
MotorTrend
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