This week, word on the street is Ford is killing off the Escape in order to retool that plant in Kentucky to make more EVs. At face value, this might seem like a bad move. Compact crossovers like the Escape are the most popular vehicles, and because demand for EVs is … let’s say being recalibrated. But there’s a lot more to it than that.
I, personally, will not be saddened by the loss of the Escape. Ford already has the Bronco Sport to fill the same role. It does so with far more personality, and frankly probably should’ve replaced the Escape anyway. But it is eyebrow-raising that Ford of all companies, the first to completely give up on cars (save for the Mustang) in North America and focus almost entirely on trucks and SUVs, thus paving the way to the hellscape we’re in now, is cancelling one of their best-selling SUVs.
This all ties into Ford’s “Model T moment” this week. It’s a new vehicle architecture called the “Universal EV” platform, and the first vehicle to roll on this platform will be a midsize pickup truck that’s about the size of a Maverick. Oh, and it’ll have a Slate-shattering starting price of “around thirty grand” in U.S. dollars.
Sounds impressive, but it’s not exactly groundbreaking news on its own. The real news is in a new production process that, at a glance, appears to be very similar to Tesla’s radical “unboxed” production process that they’re using to build the CyberCab. Rumour has it Ford has picked up some key production talent from Tesla to facilitate this, but nothing that I can substantiate at the moment. Either way, actually making it happen is a monumental engineering challenge that will be huge if they can pull it off.
Usually when a car is built, the complete unibody skeleton is carried down the assembly line, with things being added on as it goes along. The front subframe with the complete powertrain and steering are lifted in from underneath and attached, ditto for the rear and fuel system. A wiring harness is weaved throughout the body and buttoned into place, the dashboard is dropped in through the hole in the windshield and plugged in, the carpeting, console, and seats are fished in through the door holes, and so on until it’s a complete car. This all takes a ton of steps and logistics and raising and lowering and pivoting the skeleton for access, and it all takes men and women snaking in and out through the car to actually put it all together.
The basic idea behind the unboxed process is this: instead of one assembly line, there’s a tree of three branches that join at the end. Instead of one unibody, three large aluminum castings are used instead to attach everything to. So say, for the front end, there’s a large casting for the front section of the unibody and subframe that the steering and suspension, and it can roll down the line being assembled easily, with no one having to contort through the holes in a car to attach the dashboard, because the dashboard is wide open on the back of the front subassembly.
Ford is employing a new lithium-iron-phosphate (not a typo, I mean iron, not the typical ion) battery that should reduce cost and weight, and that battery structure will effectively make up the floor of the car, and the middle subassembly. A third assembly will likely entail the cab and bed of the truck, plus the rear suspension.
The tricky part is at the end, when all three sub-assemblies are then joined together to become a complete vehicle. Without one structure to serve as the spine to attach everything to, keeping these big chunks of vehicle aligned with any sort of precision is a massive engineering challenge, and you cannot afford to have the front and rear misaligned by even a thousandth of an inch, less you compromise the entire structure and have an unserviceable, undrivable, unsafe mess. They’re not the first to think of it, but they’re confident they’re first to get it right in a way that really works at scale.
The benefit of this is a substantially more efficient production process that enables Ford to build more vehicles in less time with fewer personnel. To that end, about a quarter of the staff at the Louisville production facility will be transferred or packaged out, and the facility itself will see a $2 billion expansion.
Along with cutting man-hours from production to save cost, the new platform will use far fewer individual parts, and about 25% fewer fasteners. Fewer nuts and bolts may sound trivial, but Grade 10.9 automotive bolts are not exactly cheap, and those costs add up really quickly over thousands of vehicles. Another big savings is in the form of a hugely simplified wiring harness, which is more than a kilometer shorter than what’s used in the Mustang Mach E (yes, there is that much wiring in a modern car).
It all adds up, and what it adds up to is architecture that’s scalable, easy to build quickly and cheaply, and therefore able to get more vehicles to more people, just like the Rouge River assembly line did for the Model T more than a hundred years ago. There are big questions to be asked about what this means for long term durability and serviceability, if these will be able to be repaired at all after any of these large (and notoriously brittle) aluminum gigacastings are compromised in an accident, but we’ll have to wait until 2028 to see.
