Dive Brief:
- Ford Motor Co. is establishing an “Advanced Electric Vehicle Development Center” in Long Beach, California, the city's mayor Rex Richardson announced Wednesday during a live-streamed event with two Ford executives.
- The new campus will open in 2025 and house around 450 engineers, including Ford's skunkworks EV development team, led by Alan Clarke, Ford's Executive Director of Advanced EV Development.
- “Customers are telling us that electric vehicles are what they want. They just want them to be more affordable,” Clarke said at the event. “In this building, we will be able to design, develop and bring to market more affordable vehicles for our customers, and they're all going to be electric vehicles.”
Big news: @Ford Motor Company has selected Long Beach as the home for its new Advanced Electric Vehicle Development Center. https://t.co/vtDUdo8oPO pic.twitter.com/Vg0ou8kES0
— Office of Mayor Rex Richardson (@LongBeachMayor) June 26, 2024
Dive Insight:
Ford and other automakers are under growing pressure to launch more affordable EVs amid growing competition in the electric vehicle segment, with lower-priced, battery-powered models coming from Hyundai, as well as from OEMs in China. Its new EV development center will be a key part of that goal.
Ford President and CEO Jim Farley first revealed that the company created a small skunkworks team in February, saying in an earnings call the team would be tasked with developing a low-cost electric vehicle platform to underpin a mass-market EV.
At the Long Beach event, Clarke said that Ford’s strategy is to create hubs across the U.S. where it can attract the very best talent to develop new EVs. The automaker already operates Ford Greenfield Labs in Silicon Valley in the city of Palo Alto. It is one of the largest automotive manufacturer research centers in the region, according to Ford.
In line with that strategy, Ford has made investments in other U.S. R&D facilities, including in its home state of Michigan.
Earlier this month, Ford announced the reopening of Detroit’s historic Michigan Central Station after an extensive, multi-year restoration project. The automaker purchased the crumbling structure in 2018 with the goal of restoring it and transforming it into a technology and innovation hub for advanced mobility projects.
“Our new Product Development Center in Dearborn and Greenfield Labs location in Palo Alto are key locations for this talent, and Long Beach will now create a hub for development of advanced electric vehicle technologies and products,” Doug Field, Ford’s Chief Officer of EVs and Digital Systems, wrote in a post on LinkedIn after the announcement of its new campus in Long Beach.
Ford plans to launch multiple EVs on the forthcoming low-cost EV platform that its skunkworks team is developing, Farley said in the February earnings call. The platform will be a key part of the automaker’s revamped electrification strategy, but the automaker is retiming the launch of new EVs and expanding its hybrid vehicle offerings as it continues to fine-tune its EV strategy.
Farley said that the automaker’s next-generation EVs should be profitable within 12 months of launching.
