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How do you design a $30k electric pickup? Inside Ford's skunkworks

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/05/how-do-you-design-a-30000-electric-pickup-inside-fords-skunkworks/
34•PaulHoule•2d ago

Comments

iNerdier•1h ago
Who says you need Ford to do it? Aging Wheels tried a prototype of a small electric pickup a year ago from a team making one without the support of a huge car company. I have no dog in this fight, other than wanting more of transport to go electric but if Americans refuse to buy vans which probably make more sense for transporting goods this might be a good option.

Video: https://youtu.be/1OgN_qctcGs

Cthulhu_•1h ago
You don't need Ford per se, but you do need an experienced manufacturer to take a concept car to mass production, and you need mass production to make something affordable.
mft_•1h ago
I'm watching Slate [0] with interest; they aren't following a path according to your assumptions.

[0] https://www.slate.auto/en

tomrod•52m ago
They have financial capital via Bezos, I thought?

Not denigrating them whatsoever, I would like to have one.

jf•1h ago
Slate seems closer to shipping a ~$30k electric pickup: https://www.slate.auto
da_chicken•1h ago
Kelly's 14 points are still a great read and should resonate with a lot of people here.

That said, when they tried this in the past they did it by changing the sticker price to $65k+. So, color me skeptical.

wongarsu•1h ago
The list of 14 rules for running a skunkworks program and how they apply here is great and well worth reading the article, regardless of how you feel about the likelihood of Ford ever successfully executing on a $30k ev truck
GreenSalem•41m ago
Or in most of the civilised world, you can just buy a BYD Shark 6 instead.

Far superior to American made rubbish.

One must admit that Jiaqi Liang, senior director of electrical hardware at Ford's Advanced EV team went to Tsinghua University.

So the Ford design is probably nearly as good as a purely Chinese design.

The problem is going to be the rubbish American MAGA manufacturing.

vsgherzi•29m ago
The US is concerned about Chinese EVs taking over the market. For good reason they’re not happy bad and they’re extremely cheap. I’m no economist nor moralist so I can’t say if banning Chinese evs are the right move or not but I can understand the US wanting to try to create its own market before getting destroyed by the competitor. I don’t think it’s fair to say that speaks to the quality of the US alternatives. There’s plenty of smart people trying to put this together to create affordable domestic electric cars. Personally I applaud that and am happy that competition is getting legacy auto manufacturers to finally make some interesting cars.
GreenSalem•27m ago
Meanwhile we in the rest of the world will just avoid American made stuff.

The Chinese make superior items and these are not morally compromised by genocide, wars, assaults and threats upon other nations, the way that US made items are.

The rest of the world is busy routing around the corruption in the USA.

verve_rat•22m ago
You know China is busy genociding its Uyghurs population, right?

Their cars are probably better than US ones, but they are not free of the taint of genocide.

Edit: and that's not counting their aggressive territorial expansion in the South China Sea and their threats against Taiwan.

brikym•30m ago
#15 Don't tell anyone about it.
voxadam•19m ago
Kelly's 15th rule was actually "Starve before doing business with the damned Navy. They don't know what the hell they want and will drive you up a wall before they break either your heart or a more exposed part of your anatomy."
vsgherzi•20m ago
China is definitely a manufacturing powerhouse. But if you think it’s morally superior to the USA I strongly recommend doing some reading. China is an authoritarian nation with extreme censorship as can be seen with the GFW. Criticism of the government is not taken well, LGBTQ content is forbidden, poor treatment of unsupported religions, poor acts of espionage, they have mongered plenty of wars and territory disputes themselves, and have been extremely poor stuwards of their corner of the internet onto the rest of the world.

China has no legs to stand on in a mortality debate. I’m not exactly of fan of things in the US recently either for the record

Edit: forgot to mention Taiwan as well as the Hong Kong protests. Recently individuals and an Artist were arrested in China for trying to remember those passed.

vsgherzi•14m ago
Above all I believe in a democratic system where the people’s voices can be heard and we can agree on things together with proper representation. The US definitely dosent always get it right and there’s tons of evidence of this, however I do encourage our effort and hope that one day we can achieve the full foundations of the promises of the US.
culopatin•16m ago
Even if objectively one could agree that currently the products from china are better than the US ones, all the “China so good now” stuff is starting to sound like straight up in your face propaganda.
cbg0•11m ago
China, being a superpower, has a vested interest in bringing other superpowers down a peg as well as increasing other countries' dependence on China.

Their state has a serious incentive to ship out cheap cars to destroy the automotive industry in the US and the EU for example. When that happens they can double the price on all their vehicles and you can't restart your car factories to compete with them again until years down the line.

With Huawei its about telecom equipment which is essential in today's age, with TikTok it's about controlling the narrative, also essential.

Yes, US and EU manufacturers need to innovate and be less greedy but the cost to make things will always be higher than in China so even though protectionism sounds bad, you'll always have some of that around to even the playing field.

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How do you design a $30k electric pickup? Inside Ford's skunkworks

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/05/how-do-you-design-a-30000-electric-pickup-inside-fords-skunk...
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