Inside Ford's EV Development Center: The Future of Failing Fast
- Alex Oyler
- 4 minutes ago
- 7 min read
Disclosure: SBD Automotive attended a tour of Ford’s EV Development Center as a guest of Ford Motor Company. Ford assisted with some logistics, and the tour was curated entirely by Ford. No photography or videography was permitted, so this insight article uses only photographic assets provided by Ford. Views expressed are the author’s own and were not reviewed by Ford prior to publication.
Long Beach, California is a long way from Dearborn, and perhaps that is precisely the point. After a recent tour of Ford's new EV Development Center (EVDC), it is hard to walk away with any other conclusion: Ford is making a deliberate, strategically significant bet that the future of its electrification program will not be built with existing processes, tools, or culture. It will be built somewhere else, by people working differently, and then carefully grafted back onto the body of the company.
To reinforce this idea, the skunkworks team's cultural commitments were hung prominently in the lobby, with one rising above all others: fail fast. By failing fast, you fail small, a critical principle that protects the business from making big product or feature bets too early.
Two buildings, one thesis
The EVDC sits just north of Long Beach airport on a campus so new you can still see the construction footprint on satellite imagery. Approximately 350 employees work across two cavernous buildings: EVDC1 houses the visualization studio, design studio, seating and fabric labs, a vehicle-scale gantry mill, and a 3D printing lab. EVDC2, still a work-in-progress, covers performance testing, the thermal lab, high-voltage testing, HIL environments, E/E bucks, harness lab, metrology, and the vehicle garage.
The idea tying it all together is simple to articulate but difficult to execute without the right leadership and tolerance for risk. By co-locating every element of R&D inside one facility, design loops accelerate: engineers walk fifty feet rather than scheduling a transcontinental call. Vertical integration removes the multi-month spec exchanges with suppliers that have historically gated iteration speed at traditional OEMs. The team's claim is that they can prototype a vehicle build inside the facility to a level "indistinguishable" from a production unit, a bold assertion that would represent a meaningful gain in capability for Ford, if true.
What we saw supports the claim. In the visualization studio, there were three distinct gigacastings with engineered break points designed for crash repairability. In the E/E lab, a wiring harness roughly 10 kg lighter than previous Ford generations. In the thermal and high-voltage lab, an in-house E-Box, inverter, and a rear zonal ECU with the NACS charging port integrated directly into the same part. In the production thermal management unit for the UEV, we saw both left and right zonal ECUs nestled tightly. In EVDC2, a thermal chamber capable of running from -40°C to 65°C with a full dyno was nearing construction completion. The team also described an "assembly tree" production system intended to replace the traditional linear assembly line — a process-level bet that, if it scales, would compound the part-level efficiency gains on display throughout the facility. An engineer on the thermal management R&D team proudly pointed out their "hot gas bypass" thermal architecture that delivers cabin heat without a resistive heater, an elegant piece of engineering that quietly claws back range in cold climates.
What we did not see was equally telling: very little of the infotainment stack, no instrument cluster on the buck, and the infotainment system itself draped under a cloth. The ADAS work is presumably flowing through the Latitude team.
While Ford indicated to SBD Automotive that its omission was intentional, we must acknowledge that the digital cockpit software path is, for now, an open question and one that will be particularly consequential for how this team’s work might scale across other Ford programs (and vice versa). While so much of the tour was focused on the physical product engineering task, little attention was given to software. Efficiency and agility are foundational capabilities required to compete with industry disruptors, but having an equally capable software engineering competency opens critical pathways for differentiation. This may already be happening; it just wasn’t on display for public consumption quite yet.
Can EVDC work without its original sponsor, Doug Field?
The tour took on additional weight given the timing. In April, Ford announced that Doug Field, its chief EV, digital and design officer and the architect of the company's software-defined vehicle push, will leave the company after a transition period. His responsibilities are being absorbed by COO Kumar Galhotra inside a new Product Creation and Industrialization unit that folds the EV, digital, and design group into Ford's global manufacturing organization. Alan Clarke, who had been running the Long Beach skunkworks as executive director of advanced EV development, was elevated to vice president of advanced development projects.
The positive reading of this is Ford betting that the UEV program has reached enough maturity to graduate from skunkworks status and survive integration with the mothership while retaining its R&D responsibility. Some of the structural change is already in place: Ford told SBD Automotive that EVDC runs on a modern CAD and release system, the first fundamental overhaul of that infrastructure since 1987, which is the kind of working-level change that tends to outlast any single executive sponsor. However, Field’s tenure, at Ford as well as at Apple as the leader of Project Titan, will be remembered primarily for ultimately failing to bring a product to market. This is not an indictment of the EVDC program, but it does sharpen the question of how effectively Ford can translate and protect Alan Clarke's team through the industrialization process. This transition has historically been the point of failure for high-risk skunkworks bets.
With this backdrop, it’s no surprise that standing next to Alan at the start of the tour was Jolanta Coffey, the director of UEV vehicle programs, the very team responsible for scaling EVDC outputs into production vehicles. In a conversation with SBD Automotive following the tour, the Ford team emphasized that the output of EVDC isn’t a “handoff”; manufacturing has been embedded with the skunkworks design team since day one. This integrated structure materially reduces industrialization risk on paper and in principle. The test will be how well this team can constrain complexity as the platform expands to more tophats.
Is there enough time to fail, even if it’s fast?
Ford is attempting three things at once: drive the cost of an EV down as far as physics and supply chains allow by building a single platform with the scale to amortize it, compress its product development cycle through vertical integration, and use the EVDC team as the blueprint for a broader cultural shift across the enterprise. The competitive pressure from Chinese OEMs is the accelerant, one that their CEO, Jim Farley, has been very willing to admit. The calculus is unsentimental: if Ford wants to remain a global player, it must compete with Tesla on technology and with BYD on cost. Ford’s commitment to this, even as some of its competitors retreat on EV R&D, perhaps shows a willingness to endure more short-term pain as long as it remains dogmatic about its long-term strategy.
The supply chain implications are profound. While Ford stresses that its dynamic with suppliers is one of shared innovation, it’s nonetheless hard to ignore the fact that EVDC continues to absorb much of the value-add capability that would have traditionally been provided by supply chain partners, particularly for electronics and powertrain content. Either way, the level of supplier transparency and co-development required to sustain such a partnership is a posture other OEMs with deeply protective supplier relationships will struggle to replicate.
Our group caught a brief, camouflaged drive-by of the mid-size UEV truck during the tour. With prototype production slated for 2026 and the first vehicle launch from the platform targeted for 2027, it will be the first public referendum on whether any of this actually works. Pricing, trims, and naming all remain undisclosed. But a sub-$30K mid-size electric truck built on a vertically integrated, in-house platform would represent something Ford has not delivered in decades: a clean-sheet vehicle program that bends the variable cost curve rather than absorbing it. The mid-size truck program has already moved into industrialization, and Ford has indicated the EVDC team is already deep into development on the next tophat for the platform, an early signal of whether the platform-and-scale thesis can carry beyond a single nameplate. Nonetheless, Ford will need to prove it has learned to control costs at scale as it adds more programs to the UEV portfolio. The F-150 Lightning's pricing trajectory is the most visible lesson from which to draw. That is precisely where the vertical integration thesis will face its most difficult test.
If the handoff between EVDC and the rest of Ford holds, the EVDC will be remembered as the inflection point. If it does not, it becomes a particularly painful skeleton in Ford’s closet. Despite an overall investment that is likely in the hundreds of millions of dollars, the competitive logic behind the bet is hard to argue with: Ford is trying something genuinely new, not just in concept but in practice, and doing so while delivering a product. For an OEM facing structural pressure on both cost and technology, the alternative carries its own risk, arguably a greater one that centers around Ford’s competitive relevance in mainstream markets. The stakes are particularly acute for Ford Pro, the company’s market-leading fleet business: large fleet customers set multi-year procurement commitments, and the commercial vehicle segment is where cost-competitive EV platforms have the most direct and durable impact on a customer's operating economics.
"Most other volume competitors continue to work with legacy processes, tools, and suppliers when disruptors, who are rapidly gaining market share, are rewriting the rules entirely. Even if the EVDC’s way-of-working never becomes the way Ford at large works, one that feels closer to something you’d find in Shenzhen or Silicon Valley, the experiment has merit and warrants close monitoring by competitors for outcomes and lessons learned, suppliers for opportunity and risk, and partners for pathways to disruption".
How SBD can help
At SBD Automotive, we track programs like the EVDC closely because the questions they raise around vertical integration, software-defined development, and the industrialization of skunkworks innovation are the same questions our clients are working through across the industry.
If you’re navigating any of these challenges, whether in your own program structure, your supplier relationships, or your response to the broader shift in how vehicles are engineered and built, we’d welcome a conversation, just drop us an email: info@sbdautomotive.com.