alt.hn

6/7/2026 at 6:56:46 PM

How do you design a $30k electric pickup? Inside Ford's skunkworks

 https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/05/how-do-you-design-a-30000-electric-pickup-inside-fords-skunkworks/

by PaulHoule

6/10/2026 at 9:26:44 AM

I live in Germany and am sure as hell that I will never be driving a $30k electric pickup here. They'll make sure nothing like this ever becomes legal to import or drive on German roads until after there's a German car brand on it, and it costs 10x that while being identical, just to subsidize lots of local jobs that are low-wage, high-tax, and taking away manpower from other sectors/fields where it's more needed.

by gyulai

6/10/2026 at 9:46:05 AM

That sounds similar to the lamentations of American buyers who want Japanese kei trucks.

It’s protectionism all the way down I guess.

Though I see tons of US pickup trucks in the Netherlands, and have seen even lifted ones in Germany too for that matter.

by CalRobert

6/10/2026 at 9:51:09 AM

Lamenting the difficulty of registering kei trucks is kind of rich coming from the patron saint of "the roads are horribly dangerous and we need to do everything to safen them up and drivers can bear whatever that costs"

Protectionism when I don't like it, public safety when I do I guess.

In any case, they're pretty easy to register if you don't lick the boot. Whatever state you're in typically isn't gonna come after you for tax evasion for an object they aren't in the business of taxing if you catch my drift.

by cucumber3732842

6/10/2026 at 9:46:03 AM

vw offers a electro pickup for 36k excluding tax (43k EUR with tax, ). https://www.volkswagen-nutzfahrzeuge.de/de/modelle/transport...

Its less than 10x

by snowpid

6/10/2026 at 10:09:14 AM

I mean, you can see how a kastenwagen nutzfahrzeug is a very different vehicle from a consumer mid-size pickup, right?

I mean sure, technically some would call the vehicle you linked a pickup, and technically German law still identifies the consumer pickup truck as a nutzfahrzeug instead of a PKW, but it doesn’t feel like you’re making a best effort to meet GP in the middle.

by cheschire

6/10/2026 at 8:28:36 AM

Or in most of the civilised world, you can just buy a BYD Shark 6 instead.

Far superior to American made rubbish.

One must admit that Jiaqi Liang, senior director of electrical hardware at Ford's Advanced EV team went to Tsinghua University.

So the Ford design is probably nearly as good as a purely Chinese design.

The problem is going to be the rubbish American MAGA manufacturing.

by GreenSalem

6/10/2026 at 8:58:47 AM

China, being a superpower, has a vested interest in bringing other superpowers down a peg as well as increasing other countries' dependence on China.

Their state has a serious incentive to ship out cheap cars to destroy the automotive industry in the US and the EU for example. When that happens they can double the price on all their vehicles and you can't restart your car factories to compete with them again until years down the line.

With Huawei its about telecom equipment which is essential in today's age, with TikTok it's about controlling the narrative, also essential.

Yes, US and EU manufacturers need to innovate and be less greedy but the cost to make things will always be higher than in China so even though protectionism sounds bad, you'll always have some of that around to even the playing field.

by cbg0

6/10/2026 at 9:34:37 AM

Something I've been trying to articulate for a while is that the EV revolution is a smaller version of the phone and internet revolutions: it requires a bunch of infrastructure buildout, but it's also the result of individual consumer choices. And it's highly synergistic. But along with that, it will create "losers", existing companies whose business can't adapt to the new ways. Sears had a hundred-year start on Amazon as a mail-order business and couldn't adapt, for example.

In the middle of this was Jack Welch's "destroy your business dot com", which is still highly controversial. But he did at least recognize that running a big ossified business in a time of change was going to need a massive kick to get everyone out of their complacency (and if not, out of their jobs!). Cannibalize your own legacy business, or some competitor will.

I think this is a serious problem in existing car companies. They attach too much prestige and career to being "petrolheads", or simply working in the engine division; after all, that's the most expensive to develop and least easy to substitute part of the car. The EV transition threatens to sweep that all away. Probably most of the EU manufacturers won't really get on board until those people retire.

There's probably a whole other essay that could be written about labour relations and the decline of mass car manufacture in the UK while we retain a lot of high-end boutique expertise (Formula 1 etc).

Anyway, I have an EV on order from FCA Poland, so we'll see how that turns out.

by pjc50

6/10/2026 at 10:03:14 AM

This is somewhere where sensible tariffs actually do make sense. Set the tariffs to offset any government subsidies or environmental regulatory costs. If the cars are actually better, let people buy them, make domestic manufacturers compete. Just don't allow dumping.

Complete protectionism doesn't work because it makes your own manufacturers non-competitive on the global stage.

by kalleboo

6/10/2026 at 10:12:20 AM

the ironic factor is - this is how vw itself started, as did mitsubishi etc

this is called: sensible state industrial policy

by DaedalusII

6/10/2026 at 9:35:39 AM

Clearly the USA has the same vested interest. The difference is they are aggressively initiating war outside their borders to bully and get what they want.

by interactivecode

6/10/2026 at 9:10:08 AM

How come this price hike hasn't happened with solar panels, inverters, telecom equipment, batteries etc. It's been a while that such industries in europe have become obsolete

by seydor

6/10/2026 at 10:02:37 AM

For telecom, at least, governments have legislated against Huawei equipment, Nokia is going strong from a European side

by TreeInBuxton

6/10/2026 at 9:33:45 AM

It has. There's an enormous amounts of solar panel manufacturers in china that had to close down, due to the governments ordered over capacity, to try and take over the world. This has led to enormous waste of resources in china.

Now the government has ordered massive development of electric cars, to push down prices to loss making levels. In a few years, a lot of chinese elctric car manufacturers will close down, just like what happened with solar.

The trick here for the west, is to copy china, and once the internal bubble bursts, launch its own companies in solar and e-cars based on copied chinese technology.

The hunter has truly become the hunted!

by abc123abc123

6/10/2026 at 9:17:52 AM

Solar panels, inverters and batteries are not critical infrastructure and I'd wager the jobs impacted are considerably lower than the automotive industry.

by cbg0

6/10/2026 at 9:13:31 AM

I guess it's a bit like the nuclear deterrent. The threat of them raising prices or refusing to sell to other countries might be enough.

by cjrp

6/10/2026 at 9:21:04 AM

Really this is conspiracy level thinking. It's not like there's no car industry in the EU, it's just that it's grown in the low-COL areas like Slovakia and not in high-COL areas like Germany.

Chinese imports and local manufacture should be able to compete in the "free market". It's just that that term has been heavily debased by idiots misusing it, like everything else.

by pjc50

6/10/2026 at 9:14:15 AM

How is that different from what the US and (to a lesser degree) the EU tried to do? Both are examples of capitalism.

Actually I know why it's different, I was just doing an online knee jerk response the difference is that western capitalism has a hands-off (but regulated) approach, letting the companies do their own thing. China and their companies are much more involved. I'm sure the US was a lot more directly involved in setting the directions of its industry in decades past, but since then the industry and stock market took over the reins.

Another factor may be that in the west, workers have more rights, unionized, and set their own boundaries. But they were also constrained - what would've happened if someone at Ford 10, 15 years ago said "I want to develop an EV?". In the US, it took a new company (Tesla with a heap of investor money) to make strides in that area. But because Tesla didn't have any actual experience in making cars, they reinvented the wheel and are (from what I gathered) still building sub-standard cars.

If an experienced company like Ford or VAG set aside money and resources to reinvent the car every once in a while they would've been able to keep up. As it stands, all the existing car companies bolted a battery and engine to their existing models, turning their cars into some weird frankenstein of 20+ year old car electronics, electric drives, and entertainment systems because they didn't have what it takes to design a car from scratch.

They also tried to min/max and moved a lot of production to China; short-term that was a benefit, especially VAG was the biggest car manufacturer / seller over there, until they caught up and overtook them in very short order.

by Cthulhu_

6/10/2026 at 9:14:40 AM

US companies outsourcing all of their manufacturing to countries with cheaper labor and laxer environmental & labor laws led to this. What did those titans of industry think would happen down the road? "I'll be retired." Corporations have way too much power in the US, and that has considerably weakened it.

by mcdonje

6/10/2026 at 9:26:42 AM

I don't believe at all that China will always be cheaper. And in many cases I wonder if that is even true right now. Labor costs aren't what is keeping US manufacturing cost high, it is capitalist's demands for high and ever increasing profit margins and managerial bloat. Labor is only a small part of the cost of a vehicle. Workers wouldn't care if company profit margins were smaller or if the vehicles they help manufacturer are sold for less than the maximum possible, but the c-suites and investors do.

by AngryData

6/10/2026 at 9:33:02 AM

According to ChatGPT the labor cost per vehicle is more than twice as high in the US versus China. $1,341/vehicle vs $585/vehicle

https://chatgpt.com/s/t_6a292f0205ec819182b54e48ce9702a3

by cbg0

6/10/2026 at 9:35:34 AM

For vehicles in the $20-$100k price range? That feels too trivial to make a difference, is it correct or just a number chatgpt invented?

by pjc50

6/10/2026 at 8:40:17 AM

The US is concerned about Chinese EVs taking over the market. For good reason they’re not happy bad and they’re extremely cheap. I’m no economist nor moralist so I can’t say if banning Chinese evs are the right move or not but I can understand the US wanting to try to create its own market before getting destroyed by the competitor. I don’t think it’s fair to say that speaks to the quality of the US alternatives. There’s plenty of smart people trying to put this together to create affordable domestic electric cars. Personally I applaud that and am happy that competition is getting legacy auto manufacturers to finally make some interesting cars.

by vsgherzi

6/10/2026 at 9:11:40 AM

Ultimately China and US (and anyone else in the world for that matter) are doing the same thing - helping their domestic industry compete domestically and internationally, because they want prosperity for their country. They do it via different means - China via massive subsidies and US via bans and tariffs, but the end is the same.

If someone tries to tell you that these are somehow morally different, and one of them is the good guy and the other is the bad guy, they are pushing propaganda, knowingly or unknowingly.

by pepperoni_pizza

6/10/2026 at 9:10:36 AM

There is a national security and sovereignty issue that the European countries (and others) not facing - its similar to dependence on American clouds etc.

A lot of these vehicles rely on OTA updates or are controlled through apps. This essentially means the manufacturer controls them. Imagine the consequences if half the vehicles in your country stopped working, or became unsafe? Do you really want to hand this power to a foreign country?

by graemep

6/10/2026 at 9:39:54 AM

> This essentially means the manufacturer controls them

The thing is, this problem exists regardless of who the manufacturer is, and using nationalism to make it about China disguises the real problem. Tiktok didn't magically become safe or unsafe when it was divested.

by pjc50

6/10/2026 at 9:17:20 AM

No, but at the same time, the established car manufacturers are very protective of their own stuff so they are disincentivised from e.g. building a car that works offline. John Deere is infamous for this, locking down their machines to the point that they would become scrap if the company ever went under (for example).

But it's all capitalist forces, because while in theory new companies could start that make basic / offline / affordable / maintainable / reliable cars (and tractors, and everything else), there is simply not enough demand making them non-starters.

It's like people (on here) asking for open phone platforms or phones with smaller screens; they're a minority. Most people do not care.

by Cthulhu_

6/10/2026 at 8:42:18 AM

[flagged]

by GreenSalem

6/10/2026 at 8:49:45 AM

China is definitely a manufacturing powerhouse. But if you think it’s morally superior to the USA I strongly recommend doing some reading. China is an authoritarian nation with extreme censorship as can be seen with the GFW. Criticism of the government is not taken well, LGBTQ content is forbidden, poor treatment of unsupported religions, poor acts of espionage, they have mongered plenty of wars and territory disputes themselves, and have been extremely poor stuwards of their corner of the internet onto the rest of the world.

China has no legs to stand on in a mortality debate. I’m not exactly of fan of things in the US recently either for the record

Edit: forgot to mention Taiwan as well as the Hong Kong protests. Recently individuals and an Artist were arrested in China for trying to remember those passed.

by vsgherzi

6/10/2026 at 8:55:39 AM

Above all I believe in a democratic system where the people’s voices can be heard and we can agree on things together with proper representation. The US definitely dosent always get it right and there’s tons of evidence of this, however I do encourage our effort and hope that one day we can achieve the full foundations of the promises of the US.

by vsgherzi

6/10/2026 at 9:07:39 AM

If the US is shit, then the CCP is shit that has been eaten and puked back up.

by UltraSane

6/10/2026 at 8:47:16 AM

You know China is busy genociding its Uyghurs population, right?

Their cars are probably better than US ones, but they are not free of the taint of genocide.

Edit: and that's not counting their aggressive territorial expansion in the South China Sea and their threats against Taiwan.

by verve_rat

6/10/2026 at 9:07:37 AM

I don't want to come across as the China pisser because most big countries do scumbag things of have done them (cough colonialism). But some more of China's vices that are out of sight:

- Keep the war going in Myanmar with terrible results for the population of one of the biggest and most populous countries in the world. You just don't hear about it because no journalist goes there. - Keeping North Korea in the saddle whereas they could have gently pushed for improvements. - Keeping the war in Ukraine going. If Chinese leadership has any moral ambition, they could stop the war quickly. But they don't. Their own agenda comes first, as is the case with any superpower.

But yes man I would buy a BYD immediatey and it pisses me off to no end that hey are 5x more expensive in Europe than in China. I guess the whole morality of free trade was only 'good' as long as it benefited us.

by kaon_2

6/10/2026 at 8:53:55 AM

Even if objectively one could agree that currently the products from china are better than the US ones, all the “China so good now” stuff is starting to sound like straight up in your face propaganda.

by culopatin

6/10/2026 at 9:24:29 AM

Or just objective reality? I've been shopping EVs lately and both Tesla and BYD have compelling offerings.

One things for sure: somehow Japanese cars aren't in the mix at all (the experience of trying to even see the bz4x at a Toyota dealer felt like the dealer was unhappy I was even there to see it).

by XorNot

6/10/2026 at 9:54:04 AM

Very bold move to come on an American forum and shit on america. But you cheated by putting a 'fuck maga' at the end.

Please try again in a few days without that and I'd love to see how it goes.

by sourcegrift

6/10/2026 at 8:31:24 AM

[flagged]

by ulfw

6/10/2026 at 8:08:51 AM

The list of 14 rules for running a skunkworks program and how they apply here is great and well worth reading the article, regardless of how you feel about the likelihood of Ford ever successfully executing on a $30k ev truck

by wongarsu

6/10/2026 at 9:59:47 AM

I've worked on skunkworks projects. It's all fine and dandy until it becomes a product and the main company takes over.

by TomMasz

6/10/2026 at 7:49:34 AM

Who says you need Ford to do it? Aging Wheels tried a prototype of a small electric pickup a year ago from a team making one without the support of a huge car company. I have no dog in this fight, other than wanting more of transport to go electric but if Americans refuse to buy vans which probably make more sense for transporting goods this might be a good option.

Video: https://youtu.be/1OgN_qctcGs

by iNerdier

6/10/2026 at 7:53:57 AM

You don't need Ford per se, but you do need an experienced manufacturer to take a concept car to mass production, and you need mass production to make something affordable.

by Cthulhu_

6/10/2026 at 8:01:13 AM

I'm watching Slate [0] with interest; they aren't following a path according to your assumptions.

[0] https://www.slate.auto/en

by mft_

6/10/2026 at 9:18:44 AM

Would be interesting to follow, but as of now they look to be in a startup phase still. Car companies take years to establish themselves. This one seems close though, they say they will do their first deliveries later this year.

by Cthulhu_

6/10/2026 at 8:17:42 AM

They have financial capital via Bezos, I thought?

Not denigrating them whatsoever, I would like to have one.

by tomrod

6/10/2026 at 9:07:03 AM

Yes; but they don't (AFAIK) have a track record or pre-existing facilities for car design or manufacturing, per the comment I was replying to.

by mft_

6/10/2026 at 8:39:14 AM

#15 Don't tell anyone about it.

by brikym

6/10/2026 at 8:50:11 AM

Kelly's 15th rule was actually "Starve before doing business with the damned Navy. They don't know what the hell they want and will drive you up a wall before they break either your heart or a more exposed part of your anatomy."

by voxadam

6/10/2026 at 9:43:16 AM

From the title, I expected this to be about electric guitars :-(

by leethargo

6/10/2026 at 8:08:14 AM

Kelly's 14 points are still a great read and should resonate with a lot of people here.

That said, when they tried this in the past they did it by changing the sticker price to $65k+. So, color me skeptical.

by da_chicken

6/10/2026 at 9:24:44 AM

Can't wait for Ford's $40,000 electric pickup.

Pepperidge Farm remembers the $19,995 MSRP Ford Maverick with its standard hybrid drivetrain. Missed my chance to buy one, watched the price bloat out and nope.

by kotaKat

6/10/2026 at 8:01:33 AM

Slate seems closer to shipping a ~$30k electric pickup: https://www.slate.auto

by jf

6/10/2026 at 9:24:18 AM

I will believe when I see it, until then it's just vaporware, let's see the price if they ship at all by the end of 2026/beginning 2027 maybe.

by Markoff