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To say that Ford Motor Company’s Electric Vehicle Development Center in Long Beach, California, is moving at the speed of a startup wouldn’t be doing the project justice.
Neither would trying to summarize the operation, nested among two large warehouse-style buildings at the fringes of Long Beach Airport near various aerospace startups, as a lab or R&D facility.
Ford’s EVDC, which was established about a year ago and is leading development of the automaker’s affordable electric truck, and its Universal Electric Vehicle platform, has been hustling quietly on the sidelines as an under-the-radar development skunkworks developing what will underpin five affordable vehicles Ford has promised to launch by 2030 — starting with a midsize electric pickup the company will build at its Louisville Assembly Plant in Kentucky for deliveries in 2027.
As sister publication WardsAuto attended one of the first opportunities to get a glimpse inside this facility, Alan Clarke, Ford vice president, Advanced Development Projects, called the Long Beach project a skunkworks, a term first coined by Lockheed for its accelerated jet fighter development during World War II. According to Clarke, the automaker has mostly adhered to Lockheed’s “14 Rules and Practices” of skunkworks, drawn up by company founder Kelly Johnson in 1943. The guidelines include a reduced number of people working on the project, limited access by outsiders, a vastly streamlined reporting structure and minimized reports on progress with frequent cost reviews — all while having access to the resources of the larger company.
