Ford’s secretive, low-cost EV team is growing with talent from Rivian, Tesla and Apple

There’s been a lot of chaos in the electric vehicle world lately, and Ford has taken advantage of this to build out its secretive, low-cost EV team.

A JS review of LinkedIn data found that Ford has grown this team to about 300 employees over the past year. That includes about 50 from Rivian, more than 20 from Tesla, and a dozen from cash-strapped Canoo. It also hired about 10 employees from Lucid Motors, and a handful from Apple’s recently disbanded EV team known as Project Titan.

Ford has also hired two senior aerodynamicists outside Formula 1 teams to work on the project.

The growth of the secretive team comes as Ford, like its rivals, looks for ways to drastically reduce the cost of electric cars in an effort to catch Tesla, while fending off low-cost competition in China. “All of our EV teams are relentlessly focused on the cost and efficiency of our EV products because the ultimate competition will be affordable Tesla and the Chinese OEMs,” CEO Jim Farley said in February when he unveiled the project during an analyst call. .

The newly reported hires add to a group that Ford already strengthened with the late 2023 acquisition of a startup called Auto Motive Power, or AMP. That team of more than 100 people was brought in from Ford to help advance work on a low-cost electric vehicle platform intended to power next-generation vehicles that could truly compete with Tesla at the mass market level.

Ford was already expanding the team before the acquisition. The main hub is in Irvine, California, the same place Rivian claims as its headquarters. In the second half of 2023, Ford hired a dozen former Rivian employees, many of them engineers. It also brought Canoo’s former director of software operations and a senior manufacturer on board. (Canoo has a large office in nearby Torrance, California.)

Hiring accelerated in early 2024, when Ford brought in a senior mechanical design engineer to work on Tesla’s “gigacasting” team. That effort involves making the underbody of a vehicle in just a few large pieces, rather than welding or riveting many more together, in an effort to simplify the process.

Rivian’s decision to lay off 10% of its workforce in February also appears to have given Ford an opportunity to attract talent, as the Advanced EV team hired another dozen engineers in the following months. Ford also brought in Canoo’s former VP of engineering in May.

More recently, Ford has expanded the team’s presence in Palo Alto. It brought in electrical engineers and program managers from AV operator Nuro (which was restructured in 2023), Lucid Motors (which cut 1,300 jobs last year) and eVTOL startup Joby. It also added several Project Titan engineers to the Palo Alto office in May and June 2024.

Very few of the new hires Ford has brought into the project over the past year come from outside the electric car world. Those that did were mostly from eVTOL startups like Joby, Archer and Supernal.

The company declined to respond to specific questions about how it is building out the team, known internally as Ford Advanced EV. It was also noted that some of the work being done by Ford Advanced EV could be applied to other efforts within the company, and not necessarily just the low-cost EV project.

“The Ford Advanced EV team is part of a global effort to build focused technology and product development teams locally in top talent centers. This team is leading the development of breakthrough EV products and technologies,” said Doug Field, Ford’s chief EV, digital and design officer, in a statement to JS.