What It’s Like Inside The Secret Lab Where Ford’s Designing A $30k Electric Truck For America Before China Does

Ford is going for it. In an America that many think has given up on EVs and conceded defeat to China, the Blue Oval brand has nixed its high-dollar EV projects, and instead put all of its chips on a secret program called The Universal Electric Vehicle Platform. With the first vehicle expected to be a budget-focused, sub-$30,000 pickup truck for 2027, this Universal EV platform is meant to not just bring cool electric vehicles to the U.S., but legitimately competitive ones. And to do that, Ford has built a company-within-a-company — a Skunkworks — and has given me a behind-the-scenes look.

Rolling up to Ford’s Electric Vehicle Development Center (EVDC #1), located in Long Beach right next to an airport runway, I had little indication other than a sign that there was an entire miniature car company inside what looked like an office building but was actually much, much bigger.

Ford had invited a bunch of journalists with a note reading:

For the past two years, a small, hand-picked Ford team has been operating in secret in California with the mission to radically rethink electric vehicles from the ground up.

You are among a small group invited to explore the Ford Advanced EV team’s operation and new facility in Long Beach, CA. You’ll be guided by the team who is innovating and developing the next generation of electric vehicles.

Join us for a rare look behind the security badged areas at the new Electric Vehicle Development Center. You will go where the public isn’t allowed – into the labs and onto the shop floor – to see how we are engineering a family of affordable, high-tech electric vehicles.

Needless to say: I was excited. Extremely excited. But by the end of the tour, I would be even more so.

The Lobby

Upon entering EVDC, I was greeted by a lobby with a towering ceiling and an illuminated Ford script on the wall. Off to the side was a list of EVDC’s Cultural Commandments, which read:

1. Fight Silos
2. Democratize
3. Step on toes
4. Simplify
5. …down to the atom
6. Sir Isaac decides
7. Be the end user
8. It’s your job
9. Explore constraints
10. Fail fast
11. Earn our right to exist
12. Demonstrate ownership

If this sounds start-up-y, it’s because it is, and that’s what Ford wanted to get across upon greeting journalists. In order to build EVs in a way that’s competitive (both in terms of quality and speed-to-market – “Speed is the name of the game,” Ford said), Ford says it put together a small team, gave them resources and autonomy, and knocked down bureaucracy. “Try things, fail fast, and ideate,” Ford’s team said about this “company within a company” made up of around 300 designers, engineers, supply chain experts and more — many from EV startups, tech companies, and from within Ford.

The Visualization Studio

After Ford taped my cellphone to prevent me from taking photos, they let me through a pair of doors, on the other side of which was a sea of computers helmed by enginerds.

We walked by, through a set of doors that required a key-card, and into a “Visualization Studio,” where Kevin Young and Vladimir Bogachuk — Advanced Manufacturing Program Chief and Chief Engineer of Advanced Vehicle Structure Architecture, respectively — stood next to a body-in-white somewhat similar to this one:

You’ll notice that the front and rear wheel housings are aluminum castings, which Ford calls “unicastings.” These and the battery pack act as the backbone of the mixed metal vehicle structure, and because the castings are single units, they reduce the number of fasteners and joints, they reduce the amount of sealant used, they reduce the number of manufacturing robots needed, and on and on.

It’s fairly well established by now — especially after the world learned about Tesla’s “gigacastings” — that building a big section of a car in a single casting is way, way less expensive (and less error-prone) than building that section with a bunch of metal parts that have to be joined together.

This was a part of the tour where Ford iterated: The best part is no part. If there has to be a part, it has to serve multiple functions.

Bogachuk mentioned that he used to work at a body shop, and that it matters a lot to him and Ford that these vehicles be repairable (there has been a lot of concern over repairability of cast aluminum structures). “We at Ford have a lot of access to insurance companies,” he told journalists. Between this and input from Ford’s many dealers, engineers have studied how vehicles tend to crash and what areas are most prone to damage.

Repairability is usually a resulting factor, Bogachuk told us. But for the Universal EV Platform, Ford made it a constraint, ensuring that the bumper and body “convolutes” are designed collapse in a progressive manner, and that there are strategic cut-lines where a body shop can simply break off the damaged off section, and then bond and rivet on a new section. “Repairability is a big constraint to enable affordability for our customer,” Bogachuk noted.

We left that visualization studio into a larger garage; this was the design studio. We walked past three vehicles hidden under drapes (see below), we saw the clay model milling machines you see above, and we spoke with designers about the new materials in the upcoming truck’s interior.

The team noted that its job was to define all the shapes and materials in the vehicles that would be built on the Universal EV Platform, avoiding “greenwashing” and prioritizing durability. I have in my notes: “They’re designing a lot of stuff from scratch; is that the cheapest way of doing this?” (Ford later pointed to “bounty culture” to answer that question — it’s all about constantly evaluating tradeoffs, with affordability being the guiding light).

Off to the side I noticed a late 1960s Ford Escort rally car. What was that doing in the design studio? I have no idea, but I’m going to dream that it is this somehow being used as inspiration for the new truck’s design.

Trim Shop

The next stop was the Trim Shop, where Scott Anderson (who formerly worked for Tesla) was showing us how his team was developing the new car’s seats. “What we are trying to do is iterate really quickly,” he told us, saying relying solely on a supplier to be able to test new seats would slow the team down significantly. He showed us the materials and the machinery his small team had at its disposal to very quickly create physical mockups of new designs so that they can test, evaluate, redesign, rebuild, and retest.

After saying it might take three months to get a supplier to send a seat after receiving specifications from Ford, Anderson reiterated how the company being able to do it all in-house was a huge enabler. “From concept to physical part in about two weeks,” he told journalists. “The bottom line for customers is improved comfort and durability at a low cost” as Ford has more control over the patterns and of the yield of the materials (i.e. how much of a material can use without having to scrap too much).

Fabrication

Ford took journalists out of the trim shop and past a five-axis gantry mill, namely the Endura Linear 911, by the German company Fooke:

It’s an impressive machine (here’s the spec sheet, for those curious), with Ford using it to mill clay, aluminum or foam of various sizes — all the way up to a full-size vehicle that might be used for aerodynamic testing.

While we were there, engineers showed us an entire hood that had been milled out of foam, plus they showed 3-D printed accelerator pedals and pedal brackets.

Ford mentioned that its three types of rapid prototyping/3D printing are:

1. Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM)
2. Polyjet (used for colorful parts like the taillights)
3. Multijet Fusion (used to print hinges and clips)

Before we left the fab shop, Ford showed a rather crude looking “buck” made out of wood. It honestly looked like something a child could have scraped together, though Ford wasn’t embarrassed at all by the wood-car. The goal was to be quick, and slapping together some wood boards to get an idea of interior volume and overall vehicle proportion just works. When speed is “the name of the game,” as Ford put it, you can’t worry too much about elegance. That brings me to EVDC #2.

EVDC #2

The group of journalists exited EVDC #1 for a separate, also enormous building creatively named EVDC #2. Still under construction, this is where all the cool battery stuff happens.

The first area was the Pilot Pack Production area, which featured huge overhead cranes, as well as battery testing and teardown spots, plus a welding station and a thermal chamber (big ones and full drive-in ones).

We then had a chance to meet Range and Performance Testing Manager Eric Kooinga, who showed us an impressively large chassis dyno (sadly I have no images of this). This allows a vehicle to be tested on rollers from -40C to 60C, in humidity up to 95%, with different solar conditions, and on various grades.

As Kooingo noted, the dyno is able to simulate road loads of a variety of drive cycles, accounting for aero drag, rolling resistance, mechanical drag, etc. Just off to the side of the dyno is a 400kW charger so that the vehicle can undergo a strenuous “tow-charge-tow” drive cycle at Gross Combined Weight. This is a good test of the thermal system, as well as a way to examine the robustness of the charging system and propulsion system.

Ford plans to use this massive dyno to create the data needed for full EPA range certification.

High Voltage And Thermal Lab

My favorite part of the Skunkworks visit was the High Voltage & Thermal Lab. This was a giant room with walls made of plastic (it was still under construction), a bunch of workbenches and desks, and scores and scores of engineers working on circuitboards, wire harnesses, the car’s LFP prismatic batteries, and cooling systems. I have in my notes “Gritty,” because this was far from a polished workplace.

It was a bit messy, a bit chaotic, but above all: You could feel the geekiness flowing as battery cells were being charged and discharged millions of times at temperatures between -40C and 60C, and as teams were trying to fully understand their cells’ battery chemistry/hardware characteristics so that they can build and test a robust battery management system.

On a monitor, Akshaya Srinivasan — Director of Range, Performance & Battery Systems Modeling — showed an EPA test cycle being run on battery cells. In order for Ford to do this, they have to understand, roughly, the vehicle’s Coast Down Coefficients (i.e. they have to have a good understanding of its aerodynamic profile, its rolling resistance, its powertrain efficiency, etc.), and they have to back-calculate the load imparted on the cells as the vehicle accelerates and decelerates so that the vehicle’s speed-trace matches that of the EPA drive cycle.

My favorite part of the tour involved cooling system engineers showing the buck you see above, adorned with the entire cooling system. Ford pointed out something called the “Compact Vehicle Thermal Management System” or CVTM. It is a beautifully integrated heat pump-equipped cooling system, and specifically I want to call out a beautiful bottle/valve setup that, to my eye, looked every bit as impressive as Tesla’s Octa-Valve. I noted down the outputs of the various cooling loops all integrated into this one bottle:

LTR1, LTR2, HC1, HC2, CC1, CC2, BT1, PEI, DGB, PE2.

LTR means low-temp radiator. HC is almost certainly heater core. The rest of it? CC might be cooling circuit? BT1? No idea. I’m ears if any of you, dear commenters, can make out what these all mean. But the thing I want to impress upon you is that, on first glance, this appears to be a tightly integrated, beautifully done cooling system.

Engineers were proud to show the three main elements of the Universal EV Platform’s power electronics — the inverter, something called an E-box, and one of the three Zonals (the charge-port Zonal) — all of which were developed in-house. The inverter does what any inverter does — converts DC to AC to feed the motor; it is the highest-power part of the system, and so the team is frequently testing its die temperatures (my notes say the inverter integrates a water cooler for both the semi-conductors and for the motor oil cooler).

The E-box, which is about the size of a skateboard, “consolidates power conversion and distribution into a single module, which can provide AC power back to a home,” per Ford. It integrates a DC-DC converter (outputting 48 volts to the car’s three “zonals”), it’s in charge of cell monitoring, it handles battery charging, and on and on. It’s roughly the size of a battery module, so it disappears under the floor in the battery pack.

Zonals are meant to reduce wiring and integrate a number of ECUs all together into, in Ford’s case, three units. I could see all three zonals clearly in what Ford calls the “Lab Car.”

Lab Car

It’s basically a bunch of metal shelves (for lack of a better term) arranged into roughly the shape of the vehicle. The point is to provide a place to install all of the wires and controllers and bits of electrical hardware all in one place to visualize and, above all, to test. Ford says it uses its Lab Car to do lots of load characterizations and to “de-risk assumptions,” ensuring that supplied parts all integrate nicely.

“This is the first time the harness, hardware, and software all come together in the same place,” Ford told reporters. An example of an error that might be caught on the Lab Car is a software issue or even something as simple as an incorrect pin-out from a mis-wired harness from a supplier.

The thing that I found most remarkable when looking at Ford’s Lab Car was just how tiny the wiring harness is. The zonal architecture, the way so many parts are integrated into so few, and the way that 48-volt system allows for reduced wire diameter, leads to a harness much smaller than any I’ve ever personally seen.

Harness Lab

Ford’s Harness Lab features spools of wires and cabinets full of ever connector you could ever want. Front and center was a giant whiteboard with nails in it. When Ford’s engineers need a quick wire hardness, this harness lab uses this pegboard to fab up that harness, looping wires around nails as shown below.

This may seem primitive, but it’s pretty much the exact same process that Koenigsegg uses, as I saw when I visited Sweden.

Measurements

Ford concluded the tour by showing us the garage (which features a bunch of lifts) and the Metrology Lab, which is there to take precise measurements, not just ones in space, but also measurements of material strength. Here’s an engineer using a Blue Light Scanner on a Ford Maverick center console; you can see the image being imported into CAD on the right:

Here’s a load cell so Ford can test material strength:

And here’s a CT scanner being used to provide an image of the inside of a speaker:

Before the tour was over, Ford’s tour guide joked “Oh, what’s that over there?”

A prototype truck drove by, adorned in full camouflage. I was unable to learn much about its styling, though its size and shape was definitely Ford Maverick-ish.

What’s The Takeaway?

The fact that a well-established company like Ford feels it needs to separate this program from the rest of the company tells you not only how different electric cars are from ICE vehicles, but also how much Tesla and China have disrupted the industry. Ford knows that if it wants to compete, it has to do things differently; it has to integrate and optimize, and it has to do everything quickly, and with the best engineers out there.

I guess that’s my takeaway of this rather brief tour: Ford is going for it. This became especially apparently when I spoke one-on-one with engineers. Unlike at previous Ford events, engineers at EVDC actually talked to me in detail about the geeky details, and it was clear that they didn’t feel they were constrained by PR’s “messaging.” This was perhaps the most obvious cultural shift that I noticed — that openness about what they were doing, and the excitement in their voice was impossible to ignore. This place is truly an engineer’s dream — a genuine Skunkworks Division where people have lots of tools and very little bullshit — a recipe for real progress.

Whether Ford can pull it off, and build a compelling $30,000-ish truck, we’ll find out next year. The company has had its share of quality issues, and competition from overseas is daunting, but it seems Ford isn’t afraid of the moment.

“There’s tons of pressure,” VP of Advanced Development Projects Alan Clarke admitted. “You can’t make diamonds without pressure.”