- Ford has an ambitious sales plan with its affordable new EV pickup, the Fathom.
- The American automaker reportedly wants to sell over 100,000 units in the first year.
- No other car company except Tesla has ever managed such a performance with a single electric model.
Ford is shooting for the stars with its upcoming Fathom electric pickup truck. The American automaker wants to sell over 100,000 units of the affordable EV in the first year of production, which is scheduled to kick off next year, according to people familiar with the matter, quoted by The Wall Street Journal.
It’s a huge goal that has only been reached by Tesla in the United States, and it shows that Ford is still serious about the EV game, despite canceling several projects that were in development for several years. Whether or not customers will actually show up at dealerships and make the company’s goal true is another story, though.
Ford Fathom Prototypes in Las Vegas
Photo by: Ford
What is clear from the get-go, however, is that the blue oval company has done things completely differently to make the upcoming Fathom as cost-effective as possible. The truck, which will start around $30,000, will be assembled using a novel assembly technique where the front, middle, and rear of the vehicle are built out as completely as possible on separate lines, and then the three sections are joined together at the end.
The carmaker has also employed the use of massive casting machines to keep the number of individual parts as low as possible, just as Tesla and many Chinese companies have been using for years, and the electrical architecture has been developed from the ground up.
Jim Farley, Ford’s CEO, has said in the past that the Fathom will offer more interior space than a Toyota RAV4, which is one of the best-selling crossovers in the country. The company has always referred to the upcoming truck as being mid-sized, though a typo found in an official sales report described the vehicle as being “small.” Ford later corrected the wording, doubling down on the mid-size description, but people who have seen the prototypes up close have said that the Fathom is similar in size to the compact, gas-powered Maverick.
Ford Fathom Prototypes in Las Vegas
Photo by: Ford
There’s still a lot we don’t know about the Fathom, and Ford is still trickling out information without revealing anything big. That said, the company has confirmed that the $30,000 EV will be powered by lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries, which can be regularly charged to 100% without worrying too much about degradation. The pickup will also be available with either rear-wheel drive or all-wheel drive, and the infotainment system will integrate Apple Maps natively–a first for the company.
The Fathom will go into production at Ford’s assembly plant in Louisville, Kentucky, where the Ford Escape and Lincoln Corsair were built until last year.
