In partnership with
Table of Contents
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.
Wake up to better business news
Some business news reads like a lullaby.
Morning Brew is the opposite.
A free daily newsletter that breaks down what’s happening in business and culture — clearly, quickly, and with enough personality to keep things interesting.
Each morning brings a sharp, easy-to-read rundown of what matters, why it matters, and what it means to you. Plus, there’s daily brain games everyone’s playing.
Business news, minus the snooze. Read by over 4 million people every morning.
🛻 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.