Ford on Friday confirmed the challenge title for its next-generation electrical truck: Undertaking T3.
Quick for “Belief The Truck,” the challenge goals to create a truck that’s “absolutely updatable, continually enhancing, and helps towing, hauling, exportable energy and countless new improvements homeowners will need,” based on a press launch from the automaker.
BlueOval Metropolis building, March 2023
The announcement comes simply earlier than an occasion scheduled Friday to preview the corporate’s mammoth BlueOval Metropolis plant in Tennessee, which Ford says will likely be able to producing 500,000 electrical vans a yr at its peak fee.
That’s a number of occasions the accelerated 150,000-per-year fee at which Ford plans to make the F-150 Lightning, and next-generation EVs from this plant will likely be a good portion of the two million EVs per yr Ford intends to make globally by late 2026.
2022 Ford F-150 Lightning pre-production
Ford has confirmed that a number of merchandise will likely be produced on the BlueOval Metropolis plant, together with from the Lincoln luxurious model. The challenge, and accompanying imaginative and prescient, could have been underway by late 2021 amid very robust curiosity within the F-150 Lightning electrical pickup, even earlier than it had been delivered. Then, Ford confirmed that the next-generation truck could be constructed on a devoted EV platform and be made in “extremely excessive quantity.”
The corporate supplied no additional particulars concerning the upcoming electrical truck itself previous to the plant occasion, though an announcement included within the launch from CEO Jim Farley added some coloration.
“PJ O’Rourke as soon as described American pickups as ‘a again porch with an engine hooked up,” stated Farley in an accompanying launch. “Nicely, this new truck goes to be just like the Millennium Falcon—with a again porch hooked up.”
Farley additional stated that the truck would be the product of a breakthrough manufacturing course of with “radical simplicity, value effectivity and high quality know-how.”
2022 Ford F-150 Lightning
That goes proper together with what Farley stated in February. Then, he additionally stated future Ford EVs will likely be “radically simplified” with fewer physique kinds, a restricted variety of construct combos, and a discount in weight and complexity—to do extra with the smallest battery pack attainable.
The corporate famous that BlueOval Metropolis is a key a part of with the ability to scale up EV manufacturing, making them extra accessible to clients. Farley has stated that an EV worth battle might make the market extraordinarily aggressive—one thing that will have been unfolding available in the market in latest months with Tesla’s across-the-board worth cuts and ensuing Mach-E worth reductions, as an illustration.
Ford Blue Oval Metropolis – rendering of producing complicated in Tennessee, September 2021
Ford Blue Oval Metropolis – rendering of producing complicated in Tennessee, September 2021
Ford Blue Oval Metropolis – rendering of producing complicated in Tennessee, September 2021
Vertical integration is constructed into the plant. Ford boasted that battery making will likely be carefully aligned with manufacturing and the battery provider, SK On—to the extent that battery cells will likely be made, put into packs, and delivered in lower than half-hour to the meeting plant.
It’ll even have its personal upfit heart the place bedliners, toolboxes, and the like will be put in robotically.
The automaker along with SK On are investing $5.6 billion within the campus, and it’ll create about 6,000 new jobs. It is going to be the corporate’s first carbon-neutral manufacturing and battery campus. Within the case of the brand new Tennessee facility, it’s utilizing recovered warmth from the utility infrastructure plus a geothermal system. The corporate seeks to energy all of its vegetation with “renewable and carbon-free” electrical energy by 2035.