Ford
- Ford is racing to challenge Tesla and BYD with a new $30,000 electric pickup coming next year.
- The pickup will be the first Ford EV built with unicasting, a manufacturing process pioneered by Tesla.
- Ex-Tesla exec Alan Clarke said it would make Ford’s EVs nearly a third lighter than the competition.
Ford is taking a leaf out of Tesla’s book for its upcoming affordable EV truck.
The Detroit automaker on Tuesday showed off some of the engineering advances behind its new $30,000 electric pickup, which launches in 2027.
In addition to improved aerodynamics and a new battery system, Ford said its new EV production line would deploy unicasting for the first time. It’s a process that uses giant hydraulic presses to shape molten aluminium into large pieces of the vehicle frame, reducing the number of parts and allowing different sections of the vehicle to be assembled separately.
Tesla famously pioneered this technique, which is also known as “gigacasting.” Alan Clarke, a former Tesla executive poached by Ford in 2022 to develop its next-generation EVs, said adopting unicasting would allow Ford to build electric vehicles that are lighter than the competition, including Tesla’s Model Y.
“We think that compared to the best one on the market today, we’re something like 27% lighter,” Clarke told reporters in a Q&A on Thursday.
Taking Tesla’s lead
Ford said that the unicasting approach means that its new electric pickup truck would use just two body parts in its front and rear structure, compared to 147 on Ford’s Maverick pickup.
Tesla has been using large-scale aluminium castings on its production lines since 2020. A number of other automakers, including Toyota and Volvo, have since adopted the technique. In 2023, Reuters reported that Ford had purchased a giant “gigapress” for R&D purposes from the same Italian supplier used by Tesla.
Clark said that Ford’s engineers had “obsessed” over cutting down on weight to increase its range.
“We know that many customers expect more than 300 miles of range, and the solution up until now has been to install bigger, more expensive batteries,” he said.
“This increases the weight, and that requires even more energy to move around,” Clarke added.
Ford’s $30,000 electric truck will instead rely on weight reductions and improved aerodynamics to boost range, Clarke said, with the team working on the electric truck stacked full of ex-Formula 1 aerodynamic engineers.
The company has also turned to a new battery based on Lithium Iron-Phosphate chemistry, which is popular with Chinese EV makers. The battery will be built in Michigan with technology licensed from a China-based firm, CATL.
Ford plans to use the same unicast system for its upcoming lineup of electric vehicles. The company is planning to build at least five vehicles on the new EV platform, potentially including SUVs and commercial vans.
Ford switches gears
Ford has not yet shared the price or range of its electric pickup, which the company began developing in a separate “skunkworks” team based in California in 2022.
The company’s EVs have, in the past, lagged behind the competition on weight and efficiency. CEO Jim Farley said in a November podcast interview that when Ford took apart Tesla’s Model 3 for the first time, the company realized its Mustang Mach-E model had about 1 mile more electrical wiring than its rival, making it far heavier.
Ford largely abandoned its efforts to break Tesla’s dominance with a lineup of large, expensive EVs in December, after the end of the $7,500 tax credit for new electric vehicles in the US sparked a major slowdown in demand. The company took a nearly $20 billion EV-related charge as it shifted production toward hybrid vehicles, and scrapped the all-electric version of its F-150 Lightning pickup.
Instead, Ford is betting on smaller, more affordable EVs like the upcoming $30,000 pickup, which Farley has described as the automaker’s modern-day “Model T moment,” a nod to the company’s early 1900s car that revolutionized the automotive industry.
In its earnings last week, Ford reported that its EV division lost $4.8 billion in 2025, with another $4 billion to $5 billion in losses expected this year.
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