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We are here in Long Beach, California, at Ford's brand new electric vehicle Development Center. Up until a few months ago, this was a very secretive location. It started as a skunkworks team with one person, and it has now grown to about 350 people, and they are developing what they're calling the Universal Electric V ehicle. This is Ford's $5 billion bet, as Ford CEO Jim Farley has called it. The main goal is to obviously compete against the growing competition of Chinese vehicles globally, as well as U.S. industry leader Tesla. The first one is expected to be a midsize
pickup truck due out next year. We spoke with Alan Clarke, the executive leading all of this, and what he pretty much described to us is that this pickup will be in a league of its own. I mean, the midsize pickup truck, there won't be anything that competes with it, either in price or product form. And so I think it sort of stands alone in that sense. But it's also more room than a Rav4, which is the number one selling SUV in the world right now. It's got a bed size that's ultra useful. It has secure lockable storage in the front and it's long range. All of those things together are going to make it such that it's super compelling for a massive quantity of customers,
including many people who have never thought about buying a pickup truck before. A lot of the employees here were from Tesla. They were from other EV startups, aerospace, even some defense workers, and then of course, Ford Motor Company. So they're really trying to bring a lot of employees and a lot of different ideas together to be able to build what they think is going to be a revolutionary vehicle. Obviously, a lot has changed in the electric vehicle market since Ford announced this several years ago, the industry has not come to fruition as much as many thought it was going to be. But Ford believes this vehicle will be able to get
through all of that, and it will differentiate itself as a winner in the marketplace against internal combustion engine traditional vehicles, as well as EVs. What gives you confidence that, I mean, this could be the best EV ever built, but the market isn't there. I think agility is key. You know, we've been able to pivot around all the different market conditions, everything from tariffs to different subsidies, you name it. The EV industry has had massive headwinds, and so we've had to adjust. And the only way we can adjust is by having the
smartest people work around the constraints that exist. And when things change, we change. So I'm very confident it's the right team doing it. We've also invested in the right places. You don't get to low material costs by doing things the same way you've already done them. And so we've had to take new ideas and really do hard core engineering work to get them ready for volume production. And the result of that is you can hit the cost basis that we're talking about to be able to sell vehicles at the price points that we're going to offer. And Ford is taking what they're learning here and using it across the company. So we should see a lot of these best practices going out throughout Ford in the coming years and months. And from there on out,
we'll see kind of a changing Ford, a more dynamic Ford. That's kind of what they're going for.
