When Tesla launched the Cybertruck, its brutalist stainless-steel exterior dominated the headlines. It looked and felt - and still does today - like something otherworldly. But beneath the polarizing design lies a trove of massive, high-risk manufacturing innovations pioneered by Tesla.
Now, as Ford gears up to launch a highly anticipated $30,000 mid-size electric truck in 2027, it is becoming abundantly clear that the engineers at the Blue Oval have been taking meticulous notes.
In fact, Ford didn’t just copy Tesla’s homework - they hired the engineers who wrote it.
Learning the Tricks
Led by Doug Field and Alan Clarke, both former high-ranking Tesla executives with over a decade of experience building Tesla’s underlying architecture, Ford’s new skunkworks team has been hard at work developing their new Universal Electric Vehicle (UEV) platform.
By adopting the exact same first-principles engineering that Tesla used on the Cybertruck, Ford has completely ripped up its old legacy playbook. This is the first time that a legacy OEM has decided to take such drastic steps in adopting from Tesla’s playbook.
Shifting to 48V and Zonal Architecture
For decades, the automotive industry has relied on standard 12-volt electrical systems. The Cybertruck was the first vehicle to break that mold by shifting to a fully 48-volt architecture. In fact, Elon Musk open-sourced a how-to pamphlet that was sent out to legacy OEM CEOs to encourage their adoption of the new, more efficient system. Jim Farley was one of the first to receive it, and he publicly thanked Elon Musk back in 2023.
They weren't joking. We received the document today, dated Dec. 5th. Thanks, @ElonMusk. Great for the industry! https://t.co/DkLaHA84CY
— Jim Farley (@jimfarley98) December 7, 2023
Ford’s new UEV platform fully embraces this 48-volt system. Because higher voltage means less current is required to deliver the same power, that means Ford can use significantly thinner wires. Paired with a new zonal architecture similar to the one that Tesla already uses and Rivian recently implemented, it consolidates dozens of third-party controllers into just five Ford-designed CPUs.
The results from this optimization are staggeringly efficient. Ford claims the new wiring harness for this mid-size truck will be over 4,000 feet shorter and 22 pounds lighter than the one used in the Mustang Mach-E - a vehicle of comparable body size.
48V Accessories May Become Standard
This is a drastic shift for the accessory industry. Today, it is a challenge to find electrical accessories that are compatible with the Cybertruck, and you often have to down-step the voltage or use esoteric tricks with lead-acid batteries to power things like winches, unless they are made specifically for it.
With a large OEM like Ford leaning into 48V, we will likely see a lot of compatible, first- and third-party 48-volt accessories, which will eventually become compatible with the Cybertruck.
From 146 to 2: The Magic of Gigacastings
Tesla revolutionized automotive manufacturing by using massive high-pressure die-casting machines, known as Gigapresses, to cast entire sections of the Model Y and Cybertruck underbodies in a single piece, eliminating hundreds of welds and the work of hundreds of feet of robots on the assembly line.
Ford is bringing this exact process to the UEV platform under the new name “Unicasting”. To put the efficiency gains into perspective, the front and rear structures of the current gas-powered Ford Maverick comprise 146 stamped parts. On the new UEV truck, those parts have been condensed into just two massive aluminum castings.
Structural LFP Core
To bridge those two massive front and rear unicastings together, Ford is taking another page from Tesla’s playbook: the structural battery pack.
Rather than building a heavy steel frame and bolting the battery inside, the new UEV platform uses the battery pack itself as the foundational floor structure of the vehicle.
To keep costs low and hit that $30,000 starting price, Ford is using LFP (lithium-iron phosphate) batteries in this platform. While they’re less energy dense and have smaller temperature sweet-spots than standard nickel-based batteries, they are between 20-30% cheaper to produce.
By following an aggressive process to optimize the aerodynamics and slimming the side mirrors by 20% using a single motor, Ford is expecting to squeeze over 300 miles of range from this small and cheap LFP pack.
The End of the Line
Perhaps the most radical change is how the truck will actually be put together. Henry Ford famously invented the moving assembly line over a century ago, but Ford might be the first legacy OEM to begin putting it aside for a mirror of Tesla’s unboxed strategy - the assembly tree method.
Instead of a vehicle frame slowly moving down a single mile-long line as workers bolt parts onto it, the Ford truck will be built in three completely independent sub-assemblies (the front casting, the rear casting, and the structural battery core). The seats, center console, and carpeting are bolted directly to the open battery pack before the front and rear sections are finally merged together.
This vastly improves worker ergonomics and shrinks the factory footprint, allowing Ford to build the truck 15% faster with 40% fewer workstations.
Wrapping It Up
While the Cybertruck used gigacasting and 48-volt architecture to build a premium, six-figure halo vehicle, Ford’s genius lies in using those exact same innovations to democratize the EV.
If Doug Field, Alan Clarke, and the rest of the Ford team can successfully execute this Tesla-inspired blueprint at scale, the $30,000 mid-size truck will be a massive win for Ford - and for Cybertruck owners as all these parts and techniques become standardized throughout the industry.
