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A programming note: This past week was my final one leading InsideEVs. I’ll have more to announce soon about where I’m headed next professionally (still in journalism and still covering autos!), but I’m not yet sure what it means for this newsletter. I may publish it less often or backburner it a bit. More details as I figure things out.
⚡ This Week’s Big Charge
💡 More Details About Ford’s Universal Electric Vehicle
Before we get into Ford’s new affordable electric-vehicle platform, I want to talk about the Mazda Miata.
When Mazda’s engineers crafted the fourth-generation Miata more than a decade ago, they were convinced their iconic sports car had packed on too many pounds over the years. Their mission: get it back to roughly the original Miata’s 2,200-pound curb weight when it debuted in 1989. A daunting task, considering how 25 years of aggressive emissions and safety rules have inflated car sizes.
So they attacked weight wherever they could. The ND Miata’s wheels have four lug nuts instead of the usual five. The transmission and differential lost dozens of pounds. The seats are lighter because they use a composite material instead of springs.
Mazda calls this the “gram strategy”: cut enough grams in every way possible, and you start to cut kilograms. Lots of little things add up to big things. And the entire team stays laser-focused on one moonshot goal.
This is how the best sports cars get designed, and it’s a necessity in the racing world, where engineers go to extremes to shave lap times. The approach isn’t normally so aggressive with everyday passenger cars; it doesn’t need to be.
But it’s the plan for Ford’s Universal Electric Vehicle program. It’s the gram strategy for the EV era—a new way of designing cars to offset the inherent cost and weight of batteries. And according to Alan Clarke, who heads up advanced EV development at Ford, it was necessary to pull off the $30,000 electric truck that Ford hopes will help it compete with the likes of Tesla and BYD.
Clarke offered new details about the UEV program last week, and then dug in more with my colleague Tim Levin and me on the Plugged-In Podcast. I hope you tune in, but here are some additional highlights and thoughts.
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🛻 What We Know About Ford’s EV Truck:
Battery prices are down, but they still account for about 40% of an EV’s total costs. The bigger the battery, the more range you get—but at a price consumers may not be willing to pay.
Instead, “We have to pull costs out of areas where customers don't care,” Clarke told us. “We have to innovate in areas [where] there was no blood left to squeeze out of the stone.”
That meant reducing parts and complexity vs. a conventional truck. Unicasting allows two parts to form the EV’s body structure components; on a similarly-sized Ford Maverick, that’s 146 parts.
The truck’s mirrors use the same motor for power folding as they do for adjustment. Smaller mirrors apparently add up to 1.5 miles of additional range.
Some members of Ford’s “skunkworks” team came from Formula 1, including on the aero side. Ford claims the final product is 15% more aerodynamically efficient than any other truck on the market, which also boosts range.
The wiring harness alone is 4,000 feet shorter and 22 pounds lighter than one of Ford’s first-generation EVs.
And it offers a Rivian or Tesla-style zonal architecture with centralized compute instead of disparate ECUs—better for software updates and fewer parts and wiring overall.
The end result should be something compact, fast, high in EV range, with more interior space than a Toyota RAV4, and with a truck bed—not unlike the popular Maverick.
Those are big claims from Ford. Now, we get to see if it can deliver.
📊 More Context:
EV platform development is evolving quickly right now.
Tesla (where Clarke and other Ford UEV team members once worked) pioneered many of these manufacturing techniques, but other automakers are running with them.
Not many companies are doing this as explicitly as Ford is. But most are streamlining EVs to work the same way: simpler, lighter, with fewer components and an emphasis on efficiency over battery size.
I am reminded of how Toyota engineers were aghast when they took apart BYD’s cars and saw how they were made—cheaper, lighter and with manufacturing techniques they hadn’t considered.
Ford’s UEV project is just one platform that will be used for several new models. But lessons from it could spread across the entire company.
The biggest take is that Ford’s UEV program proves that the conventional way of building cars—lots of different parts from a wide assortment of supplier companies—doesn’t work in the electric era.
Nor does shoving batteries into a gas car platform and calling it a day. The costs are too high and customers won’t pay.
Ford especially learned that the hard way after canceling the F-150 Lightning and writing down $19.5 billion to retool its EV strategy.
🧠 I Have Questions:
For one, can Ford get quality right? The American automaker has been mired in heavy recall costs for years. And most new EV platforms have software bugs at the outset.
Ford is almost certainly in discussions about joint ventures with Chinese automakers in the U.S. If a carmaking tie-up happens with Geely or Xiaomi (hypothetically, of course), what does it mean for the UEV program?
Barring any JVs with China Inc., Ford is hanging its future EV hopes on this platform as it focuses on hybrids for its larger vehicles. Can the UEV alone deliver the electric future Ford wants? Will it even be a global product?
Clarke says Ford dealers are excited about the UEV because it’s a truck. But so was the Lightning; can this vehicle succeed where it failed?
How does Ford plan to achieve “eyes-off” autonomous driving with this vehicle? It’s been quiet so far on things like lidar.
But I do agree with Clarke on one final point: “Ultimately, it has to be better than its ICE counterpart,” he said. “That way, people aren't gonna even talk about the powertrain. It just happens to be electric, but it's an amazing product.”
In the end, if EVs are going to win out, they have to do so on merit.
📰 More Stories That Matter
Speaking of Chinese joint ventures, that was reportedly the topic of conversation with Ford CEO Jim Farley and senior Trump administration officials in Detroit. [Bloomberg]
“Detroit’s retreat from EVs is the result of a spectacular cascade of failures.” A must-read breakdown of what went wrong in the American EV transition’s first round by author and analyst Michael Dunne. [The Free Press]
But Detroit automakers are looking to revive a vehicle that was once wildly popular and now nearly forgotten: the sedan. [Wall Street Journal]
Meanwhile, Canada hopes China will boost its auto manufacturing sector. [CNBC]
📡 On My Radar
Trump’s EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin says that repealing the endangerment finding will make cars more affordable. Will it really? And what happens to these regulations in another Democratic administration? [Fox News]
The Audi Q6 E-Tron and A6 E-Tron (both of which I like) will skip the 2026 model year entirely in the U.S. Will more automakers do the same as sales slow? [Automotive News]
Polestar has a big model offensive coming, including a wagon/SUV and a new Polestar 2 sedan. Can this troubled brand mount a comeback? [Motor Trend]
Apparently, today’s teens are even more down on getting driver’s licenses than my generation was. So will they be the ones who embrace autonomous vehicles en masse? [Business Insider]
🔌 Charging News
Uber will offer incentives for EV charging providers to install plugs where its drivers live or visit frequently, making it easier to go electric. [New York Times]
That’s not all: Uber will also spend $100 million to build charging hubs for autonomous vehicles, which are overwhelmingly EVs. [InsideEVs]
The FCC granted Tesla a waiver that could open the door to wireless Cybercab charging. [Interesting Engineering]
New York’s LaGuardia Airport has a dozen new DC fast chargers right nearby, courtesy of the EVolve NY program. [QNS]
Pennsylvania’s DOT announced $100 million for more public fast chargers across the commonwealth. [PennWatch]
🔋 Battery Industry News
McKinsey says EV battery recycling will be a $70 billion business by 2040. [InsideEVs]
China’s Nio hit a new milestone: over 146,000 battery swaps in one day, after surpassing 100 million cumulative battery swaps earlier this month. [Autoblog]
More data shows that modern EV batteries are likely to outlast their cars. [Electrek]
Speaking of Ford: the UEV program is upping its battery game thanks to Auto Motive Power, an EV charging startup Ford acquired in 2023. [FastCompany]
Meanwhile, Ford is also shifting excess battery factory capacity to make energy storage systems for AI data centers. But the pivot may not be so easy. [E&E News Politico]
🤖 Autonomy News
Waymo has come under fire after revelations that it uses remote operators under certain circumstances, including people based in the Philippines. It defends the practice by saying they do not directly control the cars. [Reuters]
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul dropped a proposal for commercial robotaxi pilots in parts of the state—a loss for Waymo and a win for labor unions. [CNBC]
Robotaxis, autonomous trucks and delivery drones are coming—but high costs may prevent them from really taking off in the near-term. [Axios]
Yet autonomous vehicles are expected to be a huge driver (pardon the pun) of the entire AI-powered robotics space, which could be “a trillion-dollar opportunity by 2035.” [Transport Topics]
Tesla has disclosed five new crashes involving its Robotaxi fleet in Austin, which remains rather small. And its crash rate could be roughly four times higher than that of an average human driver. [Gizmodo]
🧠 AI News
Despite multiple controversies with deepfake images and antisemitic hate speech, xAI’s Grok AI chatbot is coming to Tesla models in Europe. [CNBC]
Meanwhile, chatbots like ChatGPT may soon be coming to Apple CarPlay. [Bloomberg]
“More than 80% of consumers anticipate using AI in a meaningful way during their next car shopping experience.” [Cox Automotive]
📤 Spread the Charge
If this newsletter helped you make sense of what matters in e-mobility, forward it to a friend or coworker. And tell them to subscribe here.
❓ How’s My Driving?
This is a work in progress, so all feedback is welcome. Send me your thoughts anytime.
💡 Did You Know?
Many automakers and adjacent companies experimented with EV prototypes, especially in the latter part of the 20th century. I don’t know if Mazda ever flirted with an electric Miata, but we know Motorola (yes, cell-phone Motorola) made an electric C4 Corvette prototype in the early 1990s.
Until next time,
—Patrick George