- [Host] Ford is coming out with an all-electric
compact SUV under the Mustang brand named Mach-E.
I did a First Impressions from the unveiling
you can check out in case you missed it,
but recently, at CES, I was able to sit down
with their Global Director of Product Development
for Battery Electric Vehicles, Darren Palmer,
and dive a bit deeper into what they're up to,
and how the Mach-E came to be.
Let's free the data.
First, I really wanted to hear about their overall
strategy, and what Ford is up to
when it comes to electrification.
- We're committing in a big way to electrification,
and we changed our strategy.
Well, really, we started our main strategy
a couple of years ago.
The board and the CO decided that the technology
was reaching a point where we're gonna be able to
bring fantastic products at the prices
that are affordable for customers, and so,
they formed Team Edison, whose job was a startup,
a cross-functional group of all ages, male, female,
different backgrounds, come together to decide
where shall we play, what's important,
and what's the future for electrification for Ford?
Where to play, and how to win, and that team's
first output was in order to advance the take up
of electric cars, you need to make them aspirational.
Make them something people never had before,
and then, their desire to have it will pull,
and so, we decided this is the way we're gonna go,
and we decided, focus on the segments of cars
that have been successful for Ford, that people love,
and the first one is the SUV, the small SUV,
and then, we move to commercials.
It's very important.
Different attributes for commercials, and then the F-150,
of course, we've announced, as well.
So focus on the things that we know people love,
and then, bring them into the electrified world,
but don't expect them to move just because it's electric.
It has to offer something they never had before,
so that's the strategy change for us
in the last couple of years.
This is the first car of the work that we've been doing.
- So it seems like they're all in, but I specifically
wanted to know about the goals for the Mach-E.
- This is the first ground up that we've ever built,
and that's what makes a difference because
it's really that hard.
That's why there's not many cars that do that.
It's really difficult, and you have to start from
the battery, and build up a car around the battery.
It's the only way.
So that's what we did, and we set our sights
on over 300 miles to begin with because that's what
customers said they ranging science in.
If it starts with 100, and 200, 300's when they
start to feel more comfortable, and that's why we set that
as an objective, and a goal, and then,
when we started saying what type of car should it be,
and it was an SUV, so which brand shall we lean towards,
well, Mustang's the best-selling sports coupe
in the world, and it has so much emotion.
Really true to Ford.
It's really one of our beloved cars,
so could we make an electric car that ties into
Mustang, and moves very much into the future?
That's how we started.
- Now, before we got too far into the conversation,
and the weeds here, I wanted to ask about
probably the most controversial choice that they made,
which was to use the Mustang brand for an SUV.
- So that was a huge, huge decision.
I mean, the car is one of the few cars in the world
that lasted five decades,
and it's still at the top of the charts.
It's still loved.
Everybody's got a Mustang story, and they're beloved,
so to touch that name, we take very seriously.
Of course, the people that did that are in our company,
and they were part of this team, too,
because as soon as we knew it was Mustang inspired
with it, we brought those people in, and said,
"What would that need to be"
"to make it authentically Mustang?"
Now, we started off inspired, but as the project developed,
and we saw what it could be, and what it could do,
at first, we weren't sure about the idea,
and then, it started to grow on us as we thought,
but I would love a car that I could get the whole family
in, that I could use all year, that has all that
connectivity, and that performance, and handling.
Why wouldn't that be a new-generation Mustang?
Because that's what we would want.
I still have a Mustang coupe.
I have one.
I love it, and I'm always gonna love that,
but this is additional.
Now, I can drive a Mustang every day
with my family in it, as well,
so that's what started to grow on us,
and we thought, "Wow, what could that be?"
But it has to be authentic,
so we did the performance.
It really has great performance.
The handling, it has outstanding handling,
low center of gravity.
It feels like a Mustang, and then, we had
all the little touches, and the emotion,
and with little touches.
It's got little cues from Mustang groundspeed on the screen,
which a Mustang owner would know about this one.
It has hints to the styling.
It projects the Mustangs on the road
when you walk up to the vehicle,
and it has its own, authentic sound because it's Mustang.
It has to have emotion to it.
- Wait, the sound it will make?
What's he talking about?
- As we leaned further into it, it's a Mustang.
Every department who also did work on Mustang,
we went to them.
What about the door handle?
What about the lights?
What about the, what would Mustang be?
And then, they helped us, and all, hundreds of people,
and one area, we said, "What about the sound?"
I mean, what would Mustang be?
So a department who does all of the sounds of the company
said, "Let us look at that," started a whole project,
what should that be, and we started off, in the early days,
we had, at one time, we were listening to (mumbles).
We had Batman, right?
And we had sci-fi films, and what's that film,
damn, just rebooted recently.
- [Host] Tron?
- Tron, yeah, and we went, what is that sound?
And they were explaining this technically
what the sounds were, and that's what they were,
and said, "Okay, got it," and Jetsons, and older,
and the V8 Mustang, all that stuff, and we were
trying to make sense of it, what would it be,
and it came out straightaway, and we started to
customize very quickly.
First thing to come out, every time, first thing,
authentic, whatever you do, authentic.
I don't want fake stuff.
I want authenticity, so we said, "Okay," so we started
recording the motors, and the drive systems,
and what type of sounds they make,
and started to work from there, and then,
we enhanced the natural sound of the vehicle,
and it's very complex, multi-temporal changes,
not just pitch, or volume.
It changes completely throughout the range,
and it's a unique sound, and then, we used some new tools.
We've got VR tools with sound, where we would
drive the car past a cafe, and we would
sit you in the car.
We'd have you stood at a crossing, and the car
would pull up, and then pull away, to see what it would
sound like, and then, because the sound goes
with the shape of the car.
It goes with the car, and so, it's part of it,
and so now, it has its own, unique sound,
and the exterior sounder is a legal requirement,
and you have to make the legal sound,
but we overlaid the legal sound with
the authentic Mustang sound, which is the same one
as inside, which is louder, so all you hear is
the new, authentic Mustang sound, and there was a moment
in LA when we unveiled, and it was dusk,
and there were three cars coming in from the run
with the journalists, and they pulled it,
one, two, three, and they went, zoom, zoom, zoom,
and oh, and I looked at my friend like,
"Oh, that sounds so good," right?
I was like, wow.
That was a moment we had after developing,
and expected that, but that unique sound
is something that you'll,
it's part of the emotion of the car.
- That all sounds good, but I really wanted to press
him a bit, and talk more about how many of the Mach-E
they plan to make.
- So here, this ties to something really important, okay,
so there have been electric cars that just lose
lots of money, and the car makers make them for compliance.
We said, "That's not sustainable for anybody,"
and we, at all companies are motivated to sell more things
that make money, so one of the goals for the car
is to be positive margin, which means the cost
is less than the price we sell it.
That means you want to sell more.
So this car is, and we did that with a combination
of fantastic purchasing team who's got the price
of the batteries that we share with many other cars.
We got them low, and it also means just the right type of
volume and price, so we've set a price that's very
reasonable, but our initial ambitions are 50,000
for the first year.
Now, many people think that's low,
but we're gonna start there, see how people take up,
see how they enjoy it, and then, we can go from there,
so that's, we've already said, that's our first year,
and actually, we've already sold out of the
launch edition vehicle.
- Okay, so 50,000 in the first year isn't nothing.
That's a decent amount, but where
are they gonna make it?
- It's a complete refit of a factory.
We'll be selling them in line because it's
quite efficient, in some ways, making electric cars,
and we bring the battery assembly in-house.
Instead of making engines in-house,
we now make battery assembly.
Cells you buy elsewhere, and so that makes it efficient,
again, to give the price point, so really,
with incentive, the price point on this car
starts at $35,000 for an SUV.
- All right, so they have a plant that's being retrofit.
Makes sense.
They're a big company.
They have lots of factories, et cetera,
but what is their go to market strategy?
How are they actually gonna roll this out
because that can be a make or break thing
for an EV.
Think Nissan Leaf, and Chevy Bolt.
- So you've gotta start with ones where you can make
them aspirational, and you can make them
what a customer wants it to be, and this one,
very reasonable price, and lots of content
for the vehicle, so the next cars we do,
we said, Transit, F-150, and then, other cars,
we're leaning into cars that people want,
cars that people are very, SUVs are very popular.
They keep growing, and growing, and growing,
so that's what customers are pulling,
so we're gonna lean into products
that customers are pulling.
They also happen to be the ones that can be
higher-end, and you can put some really amazing
content into, so using this platform, we can move
more into those type of vehicles.
We think that's what people want at the moment.
- But what about Lincoln?
That's their higher-end brand.
Are they planning anything in that space
for a battery electric vehicle?
- It's very important for Lincoln because in a luxury space,
it's really affected by electrification, and we see
customers wanting more electrification,
so we just launched the plug-in hybrid Aviator,
and it's getting a real pull because wealthy customers
have that conscience, as well, for the world.
They also see the great performance figures and say,
"Oh, I like that," but it's a two thing.
They get more performance, and they're doing
the right thing for the planet, and they just work
really well, right?
And that whole, "I don't have to go to the gas station"
is huge in that type of customer's world,
so we've started there.
We've just brought that product to market.
It's going very well, but electric Lincolns
are for sure something we're gonna do,
and we would be foolish not to share the battery,
scale, and technology, of course, so yes,
that's part of our 11 billion, $11.5 billion.
- Great, so they're really thinking big,
which I like.
That's what you have to do when it comes to making
an electric vehicle, and speaking of making
an electric vehicle, there are some major challenges here,
so I wanted to hear direct from Ford what was
the biggest challenge in making the Mach-E.
- The one it wasn't because our EPE Team,
or Electrical Powertrain Engineering Team,
they've been making electric cars for a long time,
so taxis in New York have been running hundreds
of thousands of miles, hybrids, so they've got experience,
so the drive train and the battery system
has been really good.
The sign-off has been really clean.
Kudos to that team, so that hasn't been the hard piece,
but when we decided that the digital HMI system
that we had planned was nowhere near good enough,
and we just needed a whole new system,
that was our greatest challenge, and we had to,
we had to decide, how are we gonna approach this,
so we went to see the real guys that do programming work,
and asked them, guys, do you know what next-gen HMI
really looks like, and one of them pulled out his
Alienware laptop and said, "Are you kidding me?"
"Just came back from a gaming convention in South Korea."
"Here, look at that."
Oh, yup, you've got it, you've got it, and I said,
"Well, how would we do that, and how would we do it"
"in time for this car?"
And he said, we shut the door, and he said,
equal, no gray, "This is how we work here,"
and he said, "Well, I'm not working the way we work,"
and we said, "Well, okay, well, how then?"
And he said, "Well, working like a software company."
"You guys work in teams, in scrums, cross-functional."
"They've got the support they need, direct access"
"to customers, and management, get out of the way,"
"and let us do our work."
We said, "Okay, well, we wanna do that."
So we set that team up, they named themselves
Team Menlo, because they always name themselves, right,
and then, they worked, and we just, we went every day.
What do you need today?
Coffee, pizza, some screens.
Just gave them what they needed to move,
and they went out and did research for customers
in two weeks, and live streamed the research
to the development team, and they iterated,
and then, they watched what customers wanted
because they won't check a customers conscience
to tell you what they want.
You have to try things, and get to know them,
so they developed an all new HMI demonstration
in 90 days, and along the way, they said,
"Your screen's too small."
"Go and get me a bigger screen," and we're like,
"Oh, it's too late for that," and actually,
I've gotta say, a contact company that I met here
at CES two and a half years ago, I said,
"Where am I gonna get a screen from in short term?"
And I contacted them, and said, "You told me"
"you want (mumbles)."
"Can you get me a screen?"
Two days, they turned up with a screen.
So, and they got me a screen, and helped us.
They turned up with their team, and within three days,
we had it running on a rig, and that, we got that
into the car, and that was our biggest challenge.
- I love that Darren mentioned they changed
the way they worked in order to do this
because I think that is totally essential
in order for them to have any chance of success
when making an electric vehicle, and in fact,
the interior of the Mach-E is one of my favorites
of any electric car I've seen to date,
so I was even more excited when Darren dove deeper
into what that's gonna be like,
and all the thought and care that went into that interior.
- The key thing about the HMI in this car,
human machine interface, we thought we wanted to make
a next-gen HMI that was really nice.
Wrong question.
What we realized along the way is no, no,
I need to make this whole thing personalized to you,
for your stuff, and make your life easier.
That's what it's really about, and so this HMI
is completely new.
It's written in HMI5, actually, which is amazing,
which the guys worked out, we can actually run it
in the car, but that means it's so flexible.
We can change it so easily, and within an hour
of using it, it will adapt to you, so the top things
you do will move to the top.
There's no hold button.
There's no back button.
That's the things we wanna get rid of
because, yeah, it's like, "I wanna nav," button push.
"I want the next track," one push.
"I want to answer the phone," push.
"Phone my wife," one push.
"Navigate to the gym," one push.
That's what this system has been designed to.
You can only do that by surfacing the things you do
regularly so that they're there.
So it takes an hour, just use it, and then,
your stuff's at the top.
Everything else sinks back, and it rearranges
all the time to what you use, but when we watch people,
after one hour, you're a little bit more particular
than you think you are.
Yeah, and all this stuff's at the top, and it's amazing,
so, and that's linked to your profile, and you,
your face is up front.
If your wife gets in, it switches to her,
and adapts to her, and then you get back in,
and you're back to your stuff, and so that's
really key to us, and a separate screen
for the driver information because that's real-time,
critical information, and we wanna keep the center clear,
so that, and we're very, very clear, our autodrive
system is extremely clear, but it's complicated
to switch into those modes, and tell people
it's hands-free, so that screen allows you to be
really, really clear about that, and it monitors you
while you drive true hands-free, unlimited hands-free,
while watching, and it monitors you because human beings,
their concentration goes, and in this level of systems
in all cars today, you're in charge, and so,
it has to watch that you're in charge.
So if you start looking at your phone,
it's gonna warn you, and as long as you're
watching, you can keep your hands off, and then,
in an emergency, you're ready to take over,
so that's how we designed the interior.
- And that was new information to me,
and I'm actually really excited to try it out.
All I've been able to do so far is do the test ride
at the unveiling, but hopefully, I'll be able to
get behind the wheel of one, and spend some more time
with it, and give you guys a sense of, really,
what that's like with a full review in the future,
hopefully this year, but before we get to that,
I'm curious what you think.
Would you consider buying one of these?
On paper, it's the best Tesla competition out there,
with a good price, from a reputable automaker,
so spare maybe you not liking the styling,
or their lack of supercharger compatibility,
there really aren't any reasons to dislike this car,
so seriously, would you buy one?
Leave me a comment.
Let me know, and share this video with anyone else
that's curious about this because I found this
really insightful and hopefully it opens up
a lot of people's eyes to the possibility
of going electric, which is what I'm all about here,
so thanks for watching yet again, and don't forget,
when you free the data, your mind will follow.
I'll see you guys back here in the next one.
I hope you enjoyed that interview
with Darren from Ford there, and I just really wanna
give a big shoutout to everyone on Patreon
that supports the show because you are the ones
that make this possible.
Now, if you would like to be a part of the community,
chat with me and the other members daily,
consider joining us at Patreon.com/Teslanomics,
and I hope to see you there.
(smooth music)