Ford back in the saddle with an electric Mustang
The Mustang Mach E electric sport utility vehicle Ford unveiled last week is more than another car for the storied carmaker.
The Mach E has become a high-profile test for a restructuring that has been marred by profit warnings, costly quality problems and the troubled launch in 2019 of another important vehicle, the Ford Explorer sport utility.
For CEO Jim Hackett, the Mach E ’ s aggressive design and futuristic interior represent a visible sign of the overhaul of the company s product creation process he has tried to explain to sceptical Wall Street analysts for the past two years.
By accelerating the “clock speed” of vehicle development, cutting ’overlapping product architectures to just five from 13 and extending the company’s most successful brands to new products, Ford could slash $20bn (R295bn) out of a fiveyear, 2018-2023 product plan, Hackett said.
“This is the first thing we generated out of this new thinking,” Hackett said ahead of the Mach E unveiling. “We have a lot more coming.”
For Ford chair Bill Ford Jr, the Mustang Mach E puts together two previously conflicting goals: his desire for Ford to be a leader in clean cars and make the carmaker carbon-neutral by 2030, and his personal love of the Mustang and its V8 engine.
“We are really pushing our chips in on the table with this vehicle,” Ford said ahead of the Mach E’s unveiling. The carmaker has said it will spend $11.5bn developing electric and hybrid models by 2022.
Carmakers have struggled to make money on electric vehicles. Bill Ford said after the unveiling on Sunday that the Mach E “will be profitable right from the start”.
Ford’s confidence in the Mach E, and its determination to challenge Tesla, was reflected in the location the company chose to reveal it: an airplane hangar just a short walk from the main offices of Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s SpaceX operations in Hawthorne, California.
Musk often uses SpaceX facilities to unveil Tesla’s new models, and has scheduled the debut of his electric pick-up truck for somewhere in Los Angeles this week.
Musk replied to Ford’s event with a tweet late on Sunday: “Congratulations on the Mach E! Sustainable/electric cars are the future!! Excited to see this announcement from Ford, as it will encourage other carmakers to go electric too.”
The Mach E started with humble ambitions.
The SUV originally was to be what Ted Cannis, Ford’s global director for electrification, called a “compliance” play — an electric variant of a front-wheel-drive internal combustion vehicle, aimed at generating emissions credits to comply with clean air regulations at low cost. There was no link to Mustang’s muscle-car image.
Boring electric cars were the norm for Ford and other legacy carmakers. Then Tesla in 2013 launched its Model S — an electric car that looked like a sporty European luxury sedan with a giant screen for a dashboard and entertainment and functional features that could be upgraded with software updates.
Tesla’s market value is now higher than Ford’s.
Ford’s own customer research showed dull electric cars were a mistake, Cannis and other executives said.
STARTING FROM SCRATCH
Those doubts came to a head in mid-2017 when Hackett, then newly appointed, reviewed the design for the electric SUV with executive vice-president Jim Farley, who has owned seven of the cars starting with a 1965 model he restored when he was 14 years old.
“It’s not good enough,” Hackett recalled saying. Farley agreed, and Hackett said, “We tear it up.”
The team designing the vehicle started over, using a new architecture engineered from the start to be a battery electric vehicle, instead of the original plan to use a modified version of an internal combustion engine vehicle, Ford executives said.
The Mustang muscle car’s distinctive “shark face” front end and body proportions were adapted to a new skin, and under the floor Ford designed a new battery pack that can deliver up to 483km of range in an extended-range version.
The Mustang Mach E GT Performance Edition brings the thrills Mustang is famous for, targeting 0-96km/h in the midthree-second range and estimated outputs of 342kW and 830Nm.
The redo had to be accomplished much faster than normal to stay on target for a 2020 launch.
The final call on using the Mustang name came from the top, and was not given easily.
“I was dead set against it, initially,” Ford said. He said he started to warm to the idea as he saw the styling and the performance data for the vehicle.
Ford said he did not grant his approval until earlier in 2019 after driving a prototype.
“It felt like a Mustang experience to me,” he said.
This is not the first time a challenge to reinvent the Mustang has emboldened Ford employees to break with convention during a rough patch in the company’s history.
The original Mustang launched in 1964 was derived from a mainstream Falcon compact car, and quickly became a hit, far outselling the company’s projections.
In the early 1990s, with the economy in a slump, a small group of Ford employees rebelled against a plan to transform the rear-wheel-drive Mustang into a front-wheel drive car developed by Ford’s then-partner, Japanese carmaker Mazda.
That project became a laboratory for cutting the costs of product engineering by putting representatives of different functions on the same team.
The Mach E is another turning point, Hackett said. “The science-project platform for EVs is now gone.”