How do you design a $30k electric pickup? Inside Ford's skunkworks

The list of 14 rules for running a skunkworks program and how they apply here is great and well worth reading the article, regardless of how you feel about the likelihood of Ford ever successfully executing on a $30k ev truck

I live in Germany and am sure as hell that I will never be driving a $30k electric pickup here. They'll make sure nothing like this ever becomes legal to import or drive on German roads until after there's a German car brand on it, and it costs 10x that while being identical, just to subsidize lots of local jobs that are low-wage, high-tax, and taking away manpower from other sectors/fields where it's more needed.

I've worked on skunkworks projects. It's all fine and dandy until it becomes a product and the main company takes over.

Who says you need Ford to do it? Aging Wheels tried a prototype of a small electric pickup a year ago from a team making one without the support of a huge car company. I have no dog in this fight, other than wanting more of transport to go electric but if Americans refuse to buy vans which probably make more sense for transporting goods this might be a good option.

Video: https://youtu.be/1OgN_qctcGs

#15 Don't tell anyone about it.

Kelly's 14 points are still a great read and should resonate with a lot of people here.

That said, when they tried this in the past they did it by changing the sticker price to $65k+. So, color me skeptical.

I liked Fords erev plan for a brief moment before China destroyed that with 1 MW charging. There is zero need for gas in a world when you can go from 20-80% in 3 mins.

Meh. I want that IMV Origin from Toyota

https://www.core77.com/posts/139132/Toyotas-Brilliant-Plan-t...

From the title, I expected this to be about electric guitars :-(

Can't wait for Ford's $40,000 electric pickup.

Pepperidge Farm remembers the $19,995 MSRP Ford Maverick with its standard hybrid drivetrain. Missed my chance to buy one, watched the price bloat out and nope.

Or in most of the civilised world, you can just buy a BYD Shark 6 instead.

Far superior to American made rubbish.

One must admit that Jiaqi Liang, senior director of electrical hardware at Ford's Advanced EV team went to Tsinghua University.

So the Ford design is probably nearly as good as a purely Chinese design.

The problem is going to be the rubbish American MAGA manufacturing.

Slate seems closer to shipping a ~$30k electric pickup: https://www.slate.auto