Ford Hypes “Bounty” Culture and UEV Platform

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Ford has been all over the place on electric vehicles in the past 15 years or so. Back in February 2013, it released the Ford Fusion Electric, which was basically representative of the technology at the time but was a quite weak attempt at creating an electric vehicle by electrifying a popular gas model. It didn’t seem any special effort was put into maximizing the strengths and limiting the weaknesses of EVs. Ford also released a couple of plug-in hybrids back then — the C-Max Energi and Fusion Energi — which had some of the smallest batteries in the history of plug-in vehicles, but actually sold pretty well, probably because they were not too far off of the prices of the conventional C-Max and Energi. The company just dragged its feet, dragged its feet, dragged its feet.

Then, probably because of how successful Tesla had been, the company launched the Ford Mustang Mach-E, bringing an iconic, legendary name to the first EV the company developed as an EV in earnest. Rather than modifying a gas car, the company had a startup-like team working hard to create a compelling, competitive, truly exciting and popular electric vehicle. Then there was the F-150 Lightning. But with both approaches, the products were not especially efficient, and apparently not competitive enough to attract large sales volumes.

With Donald Trump and Republicans changing US policies on fuel efficiency and EVs so dramatically, Ford decided to pull back enormously on EV plans. That seems like a huge blow. Well, it is a huge blow. However, it may also be related to a Ford journey of self-discovery and efforts to develop EVs that can compete with any other EVs in the world — even Chinese ones.

Ford has just published an article about how it wants to achieve this massive target, and its aim to have as efficient and light a platform as possible to build EVs on. I’m a bit skeptical, as the pitch seemed to be similar to what we saw BMW doing more than a decade ago, similar to what Rocky Mountain Institute (now simply RMI) used to push automakers to do, and similar to other skunkworks projects have focused on while trying to advance EV development at their respective companies. But the article, written by Alan Clarke, executive director of Advanced EV Development at Ford, brings that up as well and indicates they are looking to go above and beyond.

After telling the history of gas-powered vehicles, the need to become more fuel efficient in the 1970s, and the invention of the turbocharger, Clarke says, “Today, the industry faces a similar challenge with electric vehicles, where the engineering solution for range anxiety has mostly been to increase the size of the battery in the vehicle. But the battery is the most crucial component to tackle affordability because it accounts for somewhere around 40% of the vehicle’s total cost and upwards of 25% of its total weight. […]

“Our big bet for electric vehicles? Obsessing over the vehicle as a system to get more miles out of a smaller battery and radically simplifying the system to reduce the number of parts so we can deliver a new family of affordable electric vehicles to driveways around the world.”

Cool. Yep, who isn’t working on this?

But the interesting part of the article was where Clarke explained how vehicles are normally developed, and then said it was different for people developing the Universal Electric Vehicle (UEV) platform for future Ford EVs.

“We started by creating a team within the skunkworks operation, tasked with developing range, efficiency, and performance metrics for priorities such as weight, drag and rolling resistance, and ultimately battery size. That team armed every engineer with a new way of evaluating tradeoffs — we call them bounties.

“Historically, engineers in traditional automotive companies can be siloed in departments that match the component or system they are assigned to. They’re expected to advocate for the part they are working on while decreasing its cost, often without the context of understanding how it impacts the customer’s experience or performance of the vehicle.

“For example, the aerodynamics team always wants a lower roof for less aerodynamic drag; the occupant package team wants a higher roof for more headroom, while the interiors team wants to decrease the cabin size to reduce the cost. Usually, these groups negotiate until they find a middle ground, one that inevitably ends in a tradeoff led by yet another department tasked with making tradeoffs on behalf of the customer.

“Bounties change the negotiation, making the true cost of a tradeoff much clearer by connecting it to a specific value tied to the range and battery cost. Now, the aerodynamics team and interior team share the same goal, and both understood that adding even 1mm to the roof height would mean $1.30 in additional battery cost or .055 miles of range. With bounties, each team has a common objective to maximize range while decreasing battery cost — a direct linkage to giving our customers more.

“This is just one example of countless bounties our team focused on. When we met targets, we would set more difficult ones to challenge ourselves further. One of these areas was our energy management system.”

Hmm. Will the concept of bounties make all the difference? Is Ford finally going to become a leader on EVs?

In addition to that, the article included a section on “smart energy management.” Again, it does not look different from what other companies have been working on, but perhaps their team and their work are special in what they will achieve?

“An electrical architecture is the blueprint for how power and signals move through a product — what connects to what, how everything is controlled, and how it all works together reliably. Power conversion within an electric vehicle platform can account for a surprising amount of wasted energy in a vehicle while charging or even taking energy from the 400V battery and converting it to 48V for the low-voltage devices.

“More importantly, it’s often segregated into functions that get sourced to external suppliers, each with their own enclosures, fasteners, and connecters, which drives high costs and excess weight into the platform.

“So in 2023, we moved our high-voltage power electronics architecture and design for this platform in-house. With the acquisition of Auto Motive Power, or AMP, talented engineers joined our team with experience, pushing the limits of power conversion and energy management for numerous global electric vehicles already on the market today.

“For the first time, customers will experience a fully electric vehicle charging ecosystem designed in-house by Ford using our own software. That means the hardware in the vehicle, including the bi-directional charging capabilities, comes from a team directly integrated into the one working on the platform and vehicle products. Customers will benefit from improvements that decrease the amount of time waiting around for the battery to charge, maximize the lifespan of the battery, and decreases in total cost of ownership.

“The team’s work has had profound improvements beyond just developing Ford’s first 48-volt low-voltage system. In fact, this new hardware and software have played a key role in making the mid-size electric truck’s wire harness 4,000 feet shorter and 22 pounds lighter than one of our first-gen electric vehicles.”

Well, at the very least, it looks like significant progress at Ford. What more can you ask for?

Of course, there will be skeptics. Until Ford does something significant in the EV world, there will be skeptics. But Clarke knows that and acknowledges it, and I like that very much. “We know there will be skeptics, just like there were when Ford introduced the turbo on the F-150. Other companies will claim that they’ve tried much of this before. But physics isn’t proprietary. We’re creating a truly integrated electric vehicle platform, not a single part that can be easily copied,” he says. “If we succeed, we will have a family of vehicles that we expect to compete on price with the best in the world, including gas vehicles. There’s still a lot of work to do, but we’re making progress, and we can’t wait to share more soon.”

I like this approach, and I’d love for all of our skepticism to be proven wrong, proven pessimistic rather than realistic. Let’s see.