Ford’s answer to China: A completely new method for making cars

Dog Field, Ford president, digital design official, who was previously running appleCar Program and Establish the Development 3 in TimingHe was working to organize Ford at home SkunkWorks team The development of this project secretly, is internally referred to as CE1.

“We are building a structural battery of cells, and this is the car floor. So we have already built the seats on it,” says Field. Therefore, in order to be clear, there is no frame or structure with a battery above it that is installed on it – with the new Ford model, the battery is the structure. How is this different from the existing Cell to Shasis Or cell technology to the package? “This is from the cell to the body,” Field says, adds that making all this work very difficult.

“There is no single magic penetration. It is just a really difficult engineering,” he says. “There is a full set of problems that must be solved. Like, now you have this body that has no ground, how can you prevent it from bending with the font drop? How do you deal with the paint when you draw the back half, but you did not draw the front half, then you will install it together in the end?”

“We knew that we wanted to build (EVS) differently, and we decided how we wanted to build it – then we got a file huge A group of engineering problems that we had to solve to make this work. “The worst of these problems? Seal, disruption (strength), corrosion, accuracy of dimensions – all of these things, doing them in the end are … that the front end joint is definitely the most difficult.”

Yes, a lot of this is attached to the modern things of EVS, such as the structure of regions where different functions are controlled in different parts of the car, which you can already see in the new Tesla Y and many Chinese EVS. Likewise, large aluminum monsters are already used by Tesla and Chinese makers.

However, if Ford is sincerely able to manufacture a car in three distinctive and complete units, which are completely completed and only then, this is real first. Yes, Tesla talked about doing something like this Again in 2023 Through the “unacceptable” EV manufacturing process, it hasn’t done so yet. In other words, Ford may overcome Tesla to the punch here. Old dinosaurs have turned into Velociraptor completely.

It is almost impressive, such as the new standard manufacturing of Ford, is the number of people and the absolute speed that the company achieved this undeniable victory. “What really raises interest is the size of the team (SkungWorks) compared to whether Ford had to do this,” says Varley. “If Ford forced us to do this, it would have taken five times the people.”

“When we agreed to start the program, three years ago, Alan Clark rented us. Alan Clark I worked at Field in Tesla, where he helped create form 3, worked on it theythe CYBERTRUCKAnd more. “There are now people in China now that they may have passed, but while he established more electric cars more than anyone in the world, so the right person was ever to benefit. He is also a talent magnet. Rural Or Tesla and build something for Ford. “

Farley believes that the new Ford method in making EVS is the perfect weapon for Chinese auto manufacturers, an ideal example of how the West needs to compete. “You have a BYD model: 700,000 employees, 200,000 power generation engineers. How do you overcome them?” Farley asks.

“It turns out that Dog, Alan and the team built a payment system that was like Apollo 13, that managed to WhatsApp so that our battery could be much smaller than BYD. Their cost feature is compensated for the vertical integration of the battery by innovation in the field of innovation.