Ford Crosses into Fast Lane With $2 Billion Affordable EV Plan

At one point in Buster Keaton’s 1920 silent comedy Neighbors, a man whose arm is in a sling is approached by someone who asks: “What happened to you?” “I bought a Ford,” he replies. The joke refers to one of the pains of owning the groundbreaking Model T, widely considered the first automobile affordable to a wide swath of Americans. To start one, you needed to use a laborious hand crank.

On Monday, well over a century later, Ford promised a new “Model T moment” for electric vehicles (EVs). The company said it is investing $2 billion to build a new EV platform and manufacture an affordable EV truck — retailing at $30,000, thanks to the kind of efficient, simplified manufacturing at the heart of the Model T’s automotive revolution — that will roll out in 2027. If successful, the company believes it could transform EV adoption in America, no exhausting hand crank required.

An Electrified Blast from the Past

Ford has taken something of a backseat in its broader adoption of EVs, with the pricey F-150 Lightning and the electric Mustang as its two most prominent offerings. At Ford’s Louisville assembly plant on Monday, CEO Jim Farley said the exponential growth of Chinese companies like BYD and Geely through affordable EV options, and increasingly price–friendly EVs from US and European competitors, meant his company “needed a radical approach” to stake out its own territory. Ford’s money-losing EV business — which posted $2.2 billion in losses in the first half of 2025 — could no doubt use the jumpstart.

This “Model T” moment didn’t happen overnight. Farley last year tasked a secretive “skunkworks” team in Long Beach, California, with developing “a new generation” of affordable EVs, not unlike the secretive team founder Henry Ford set up to develop streamlined production of the Model T: 

• The $30,000 EV truck will be the first in a line of affordable battery-powered models that Ford said will take 40% less time to build and need 600 fewer workers than its hybrid-electric crossover SUV, the Escape, which is set to be discontinued after this year. Those efficiencies are thanks to the “skunkworks” team, led by former leading Tesla engineer Alan Clarke, with its new line of vehicles slated to be built at the Louisville plant, which will be converted to manufacture EVs with the $2 billion investment.
• Ford said its new EV platform will vastly reduce the number of components needed in manufacturing: 20% fewer parts than a typical vehicle and 25% fewer fasteners, translating to fewer workstations in the plant and a 15% reduction in assembly time. The batteries for the new line of EVs will come from a new $3 billion factory in Michigan.

“We believe the only way to really compete effectively with the Chinese over the globe on EVs is to go and really push ourselves to radically re-engineer and transform our engineering supply chain and manufacturing process,” Farley said. He boasted that the midsize EV pickup will cost less than a Tesla Model Y and have more room than a Toyota RAV4.

Writers Room Challenge: The Model T, which was produced from 1908 to 1927, did a great deal for comedy beyond Buster Keaton, frequently playing for laughs in silent film-era staples by the likes of Laurel & Hardy and Charlie Chaplin. Maybe we’re in for a run of Ford EV truck-themed Netflix capers.