oh my god this is a 1978 f-100 ford
pickup truck
it's got 480 horsepower
634 pound-feet of torque and it is
all-electric but you'll never be able to
buy this car in fact you'll maybe be
able to buy one of its motors
[Music]
a crate motor is an engine sold
separately from a vehicle they have
predominantly served as a way for car
enthusiasts and hobbyists to modify
their cars you know make them go faster
give them more power
and they are incredibly common with most
major car brands selling them directly
from their performance parts or
accessories brands but what most of
these crate motors have in common is
that most of them run on some sort of
fuel that was until last fall at least
when ford announced it was going to
begin selling an electric crate motor
part number m9000 mach e the exact motor
that is in ford's all-electric mustang
that came out in 2021 the gt model to be
exact in this f-100 there are actually
two of these motors and it may not seem
like a big deal until you imagine a
world where that motor isn't available
to buy anywhere and neither are any of
the other parts you need for an ev
conversion or even repairs which is sort
of where we're at right now
ford taking the initiative here and
offering a crate motor or e-crate motor
i should say for for the aftermarket is
a pretty big deal i would argue because
you know up until now people are you
know stealing a motor out of a forklift
my name is chris and i'm the ceo of
electrified garage
at electrified garage chris and his team
repair restore and modify electric
vehicles they are a non-tesla-affiliated
ev repair shop that rose to fame when
they completed a tesla quoted 16 000
repair for only 700. the way in which i
was able to do what it is i do and what
what electrified garage is able to do
what it does is by having a lot of tesla
technicians that no longer work for
tesla so we already have the background
we already have the factory training
which is something you can't get uh
anywhere else tesla is more a software
company that has a car than a car
company that has you know software they
control who can repair the vehicles who
can't and so that makes it very
difficult for a third party like us to
provide any level of service never mind
anybody that doesn't have the
specialization that we already have
historically independent mechanics have
been able to get parts and instructions
right from car manufacturers in order to
repair cars at the local level
all right becca so obviously tesla's you
don't use your brakes very often
so what happens is they get mucky and
gummed up and they don't seem to work as
well that's travis foundrin he's the
lead technician at electrified garage in
ocala florida he's walking me through
the repairs he most commonly does on evs
the filters on the teslas they're kind
of outboard they're a little bit
underneath the hood so you get some
funky humidity and funky moisture smells
going on see the brake fluid doesn't get
used a lot so it just kind of puddles up
and at the end of the calipers it's old
the antifreeze only has a life usually
around five years in terms of
supercharging they use the air
conditioning system to cool the
batteries so if your air conditioning
system is not up to par you won't be
able to supercharge you'll be stuck on
the side of the road charging like an
electric 150 ford common failure points
obviously as everybody knows with this
old car you have the battery pack if you
see here it takes up the hole underneath
of the car um basically what will happen
is you'll get a module that'll go lower
than the rest and there's just certain
methods and procedures that we use to
repair them and get the people back on
the road again for a fraction of the
cost from tesla but if car companies
start taking tesla's lead making parts
hard to get and training even harder
fixing common issues such as these may
feel less like fixing your car and more
like trying to fix your phone and i
happen to know somebody who knows a lot
about that a repair ecosystem does not
happen by accident or in the vacuum it
has to be intentionally created that's
kyle wiens he started the online repair
community ifixit he and his team have
taken apart countless pieces of tech to
both see how repairable they are and to
teach folks how to repair them
themselves tesla has been sabotaging
their own repair aftermarket by not
making available the tooling and the
parts that repair shops need i think you
have a lot of former apple folks who are
at tesla who are trying to run the apple
playbook at tesla and saying we can
control the entire experience we're
going to design and craft the ultimate
repair and service experience it's not
possible or practical for any
manufacturer to control what happens
with their product at every step of the
product's life if you think about what
it means to be able to get your car
fixed a local mechanic that mechanic
needs to have access to be able to buy
parts if there's computer software that
you need in order to program a part they
need that they need access to service
manuals wiring diagrams there's a whole
ecosystem that you need in order to be
able to repair a thing with new electric
vehicles it's much more unclear what's
going to happen we don't have that
robust aftermarket and it's not clear
whether the independent repair shops are
going to be able to retool to repair the
cards of the future
the f-100 illuminator can be seen as
ford hinting to a less walled garden
approach to evs
it encourages folks to get out into
their own garages and modify or someday
even repair the electric vehicle that
they own you know before the fuel crisis
happened and emissions was a big deal
there were all these crazy horsepower
muscle cars running around we're kind of
at that same point again but now the
next phase is going to be all these
electric cars way more powerful you can
go much faster it's easy it's clean
i would say the only thing about it is
it's kind of a sterile situation where
it doesn't make any noise there's
usually not a transmission so you're not
shifting gears so all the die-hard
manual transmission guys they're going
to be like boohoo but ultimately i mean
any time somebody gets in my car and
take them for a ride they giggle like a
little girl all the way down the road to
bring that to a classic car or something
that somebody's like you know family
heirloom it was my grandfather's car
whatever it may be you know that's
really cool um but also being able to do
it for
uh modern day cars with all the
different electronics integrations and
things of that nature is really i think
what the next step is going to be but
you need a degree in computer
programming and software engineering to
do that stuff so as great as an e-crate
motor option from ford may seem there
are still large hurdles that both
hobbyists and mechanics will have to
work through in order to get it working
at all so the difference today when you
order an e-crate motor for instance like
the ford illuminator
you're only buying a motor and a gearbox
now you need to figure out the inverter
you need to figure out a controller you
need to figure out what type of battery
you want to use so it's a much more
complex puzzle to put together and have
it actually work when you plug it in and
make sure that it produces the type of
power that you want as well as get the
type of range that you're expecting out
of the vehicle
ford isn't the only one selling e-crate
motors in 2020 chevy announced plans to
sell the k5 blazer e the same motor that
is in the chevy bolt and there's a whole
host of third-party vendors that sell
additional parts for evs but when ford
unveiled the f-100 illuminator and its
dual e-crate motors at sema last year a
large automotive aftermarket trade show
it made it clear that it too was
committing to joining the ev aftermarket
space and it proved that ford is at
least willing to let people outside of
its walled garden tinker with and
potentially fix its electric vehicles
everybody kind of is going to have to
get on board and and figure this stuff
out
and
and try to work together and i think
that's the biggest thing when large
companies such as ford break down these
walls it drives competition competition
that will undoubtedly push technology
further we didn't have 100 plus years to
kind of figure this out individually
it's all coming very quickly and there's
not enough resources to go around for
for everybody to try to be by themselves
so if these things are so like world
changing why are they not mainstream why
are they not available for everybody to
use it remains to be seen just how many
parts and how much information ford is
going to make available to the general
public in regards to its evs but e-crate
motor is certainly more than what we've
gotten from most manufacturers including
the largest tesla
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