“When you walk in, it will not feel like a plant that you’ve been in before,” Lisa Drake, Ford’s vice president of EV industrialization, told Automotive News. “Our target was to actually build this truck more efficiently than the best truck we build — and we build trucks pretty well.”
The plant will have fewer workstations, Drake said, and the vehicle built there, known internally as Project T3, will be offered to customers in significantly fewer configurations than today’s models.
“It’s a marvel of simplification,” CEO Jim Farley said at an event here in March.
Farley has stressed a need to reduce complexity and eliminate waste throughout Ford’s operations, saying the company must cut the number of fasteners in its vehicles by half and move to larger casting with fewer parts, like Tesla does, to achieve its goal of 8 percent margins on EVs.
“It’s more radical than just fasteners and brackets,” Drake said. “We’ve done some systems engineering work where, essentially, we’ve taken pieces of the truck and reduced the design content down so it’s a much more reductive design with less tooling and less people needed to install.”
