DETROIT — Ford Motor Co. has reconvened the Mustang Mach-E launch team more than a year after the EV went on sale.
The goal? Reduce costs and improve profit margins as Ford vies for a spot among the industry's EV leaders. Ford CEO Jim Farley last week said the task force already has reduced the crossover's bill of materials by US$1,000.
"What we're finding in Mach-E is that actually most of the exciting work starts after Job 1," he said on the company's fourth-quarter and full-year earnings call.
Darren Palmer, Ford's general manager of battery-electric vehicles, said in an interview that Farley's directive was to no longer wait to find efficiencies and implement changes only during midcycle updates or model-year changeovers.
"He said, 'Gone. Stop that. Take that away,' " Palmer told Automotive News. "We now do continuous improvement. You don't wait for a model year; you just continually drop them in."