Ford Motor Co unveils its Mustang Mach E electric sport vehicle

LOS ANGELES: The Mustang Mach E electric sport utility vehicle Ford Motor Co (F.N) unveiled in Los Angeles on Sunday is more than another car for the storied automaker.

The Mach E has become within Ford a high-profile test for a restructuring that has been marred by profit warnings, costly quality problems and the troubled launch this year of another important vehicle, the Ford Explorer sport utility.

For Chief Executive Jim Hackett, the Mach E’s aggressive design and futuristic interior represent a long-awaited, visible sign of the overhaul of the company’s product creation process he has tried to explain to skeptical Wall Street analysts for the past two years.

By accelerating the “clock speed” of vehicle development, cutting overlapping product architectures to just five from 13 and extending the company’s most successful brands to new products, Ford could slash $20 billion out of a five-year, 2018-2023 product plan, Hackett told Reuters.

“This is the first thing we generated out of this new thinking,” Hackett said in an interview ahead of the Mach E unveiling. “We have a lot more coming.”

For Ford Chairman Bill Ford Jr., the Mustang Mach E puts together two previously conflicting goals: His desire for Ford to be a leader in clean cars and make the automaker carbon-neutral by 2030, and his personal love of the Mustang and its growling V-8 engine.

“We are really pushing our chips in on the table with this vehicle,” Ford said in an interview ahead of the Mach E’s unveiling. The automaker has said it will spend $11.5 billion developing electric and hybrid models by 2022.

Automakers have struggled to make money on electric vehicles. Bill Ford told Reuters on Sunday after unveiling the Mach E “will be profitable right from the start.”

Ford’s confidence in the Mach E, and its determination to challenge Tesla, was reflected in the location the company chose to reveal it: An airplane hangar just a short walk from the main offices of Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s SpaceX operations in Hawthorne, Calif. Musk often uses SpaceX facilities to unveil Tesla’s new models, and has scheduled the debut of his electric pickup truck for somewhere in Los Angeles on Thursday.

 

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