Ford’s chief electric car, digital and design officer Doug Field previously ran the Apple Car program and led the Model 3 development at Tesla, which has been secretly developing the project with Ford’s internal Skunkworks team, and is known internally as CE1.
“We built a structural battery from the battery, and that’s the floor of the vehicle. So we actually built the seats on it,” Field said. So it can be clearly seen that there is no frame or structure, the seat with the battery on it is bolted, this is Ford’s new model, and the battery is structure. How is this different from existing cell-to-skull or cell techniques? “It’s cell-to-body,” Field said, adding that it’s all very, very difficult.
“There is no magic breakthrough. It’s really a very, very difficult project,” he said. “And there are a lot of problems to be solved.
“We know we want to build [EVs] The difference is different, we decide how to build them – and then we get one Huge A set of engineering problems we have to solve this work. “The worst of these issues is” joining the front end. Sealed, collapsed [strength]corrosion, dimensional accuracy – all of these things, the end thing to do is…the front end joints are definitely the hardest. ”
Yes, most of it catches up with the most advanced stuff of electric cars, such as the regional architecture that controls different functions in different parts of the vehicle, which you can already see in the new Tesla Model Y and many Chinese electric cars. Similarly, Tesla and Chinese manufacturers have used large aluminum castings.
But if Ford does manage to build a car in three different and complete modules, then finish it completely and then hold it together, that’s really first. Yes, Tesla talks about doing something similar in 2023 with the “unpackaged” EV manufacturing process, but hasn’t done that yet. In other words, Ford may have beaten Tesla. The old dinosaurs became quite tempo.
Like Ford’s new modular manufacturing industry, it’s almost like the number of people the company has won undeniable victory. “What’s really interesting is the size of the team [the skunkworks had] Compared to Ford having to do this,” Farley said: “If we force it [Ford] To do this, it will take five times the person. ”
“Three years ago, when we agreed to launch the program, we hired Alan Clarke. He went into a building and that was a man. That’s how the project started,” Field said. Alan Clarke worked at Field in Tesla, where he helped create Model 3, working at Y, Cybertruck, and more. “Now, some people in China may have passed him, but at the time he was more electric than anyone in the world, so he was definitely a suitable person. He was also a talented magnet. He did build a team very quickly – a world-class team. Many people were so excited to be from Rivian or Tesla and Ford ford ford ford ford ford ford ford.”
Farley believes that Ford’s new approach to making electric vehicles is to match the ideal weapon of Chinese automakers, which is an ideal example of how the West can compete. “You have Byd model: 700,000 employees, 200,000 powertrain engineers. How do you beat them?” asked Farley.
“It turns out that Doug and Allen and the team built a propulsion system like the Apollo 13 that manages to watts so that our batteries are much smaller than Byd. Their cost advantage in vertical integration on batteries is offset by innovation in dynamic characteristics. We can’t beat them on vertical integration. We can’t beat them on startups.
