- Ford's upcoming Fathom is an incredibly important vehicle to the brand.
- CEO Jim Farley acknowledged that it's going to be "a heck of an effort" to launch the truck effectively.
- There's still a lot that goes into the launch, but Ford is intent on delivering the affordable pickup at scale, at cost, and on time.
Ford has already taken a swing at the whole electric pickup thing. The all-electric F-150 Lightning proved—technically and mechanically—that the Blue Oval has the chutzpah to make it happen. But it also demonstrated the most important part of building a car: making something that folks will actually show up to buy.
There's a lot that goes into that recipe. It's not just transplanting an electric powertrain into an existing platform, either. There's a practical reality here, as big batteries cost big bucks. And that's what makes the upcoming Ford Fathom considerably more important than its larger, ill-fated brother.
Ford's CEO, Jim Farley, knows this. In fact, he's sweating it. At the Automotive News Congress in Detroit earlier this week, Farley made it clear that the automaker pulling out all the stops to get the Fathom release right. Even then, it's a big lift to launch the company's new Universal EV platform in a way that ensures a smooth takeoff.
"It’s going to be a heck of an effort to launch this at scale, at cost, on time," acknowledged Farley.
The Fathom is Ford's attempt to deliver a quality electric vehicle at prices that can compete with Chinese automakers. It studied the biggest names in the country's EV space to understand what consumers liked about them. Ford also learned what made them tick—under their hoods and in their silicon brains. Engineers took a look at BYD's vehicles and found a 20% battery cost advantage, and rather than shrug it off, engineers were pushed to rethink motors, gearboxes, and inverters so they could make up the difference without ultimately sacrificing range.
Ford chased weight, battery size, wiring, software, parts count, supplier costs, and more. It needed to figure out how to operate on razor thin margins to deliver what consumers were actually going to use. After all, a sub-$30,000 starting price doesn't leave a lot of room for inefficiencies in an market that is only becoming more globally competitive by the day.
Production of the Fathom is penciled in for 2027 at the Louisville Assembly Plant, where the brand is spending north of $2 billion to retool for the production UEV platform vehicles. Add on its BlueOval Battery Park and that investment rockets up to $5 billion. The question is whether all of the pieces will come together at the right time. Or, as Farley eloquently puts it, Ford hasn't "landed the plane on mass production of UEV" just yet.
All of those factors makes Ford's caution fairly understandable. The Fathom can't just be yet another electric science project for the brand. It can't be late. It can't cost more than promised. It has to be a clean launch for consumers to see that Ol' Blue still has it on the electric front.
Now that Ford has dumped billions of dollars into its production line and set the stage for success, it has to do the most complicated part of this whole process. It needs to actually build the trucks. Farley knows that's no easy pitch, but he's taking the company down the hard path anyway.
