Nora Naughton
- Ford announced plans for its next electric pickup truck.
- Project T3 will join the F-150 Lightning and Mustang Mach-E in Ford's EV lineup.
- Ford is coming after Tesla with its new EV strategy.
When Ford's new electric vehicle factory in Stanton, Tennessee comes online in 2025, it will pump out a new generation of electric pickup trucks, the company announced Friday.
The yet-to-be-named truck, code-named Project T3, will join Ford's popular F-150 Lightning electric truck and the Mustang Mach-E SUV in the company's EV lineup.
Details on the new truck are scant for now, but in a release published Friday Ford said the T3 truck is being built for the digital age. This means engineering an electric pickup truck that is "fully updatable, constantly improving, and supports towing, hauling, exportable power and endless new innovations owners will want," Ford said.
T3 will be built on Ford's EV mega-campus under construction in Tennessee right now. Ford announced its commitment to built Blue Oval City, a sprawling electric vehicle and battery manufacturing site, in 2021.
Once the new truck assembly line is complete, it will be capable of producing 500,000 electric truck a year at full production, Ford said.
Ford Motor Co.
Ford has Tesla in its sights
At the start of F-150 Lightning production in 2022, Ford CEO Jim Farley put EV leader Tesla squarely in Ford's sights.
"We plan to challenge Tesla and all comers to become the top EV maker in the world," Farley said at the time, when he also first hinted at the T3 project. "That's something that no one would have believed just two years ago from us."
Since then, Farley has modeled some of Ford's strategies after Tesla's, including an EV sales program that more closely resembles Tesla's direct sales, engaging in a pricing war, and pushing to lower manufacturing costs in order to squeeze more profit out of each vehicle.
That manufacturing cost-saving effort is reflected in the plans for the T3, which Ford said would be engineered to be built in a general assembly plant that is 30% smaller than traditional vehicle factories.
Cost-saving efforts will be key for the success of Ford's electric vehicle business, which this year is on track to burn $3 billion this year alone.