Ford's Answer to China: A Completely New Way of Making Cars

Ifirst thought Ford CEO Jim Farley was briefing me on a new car. It turned out to be something altogether more ambitious: A completely new way to make a car. Or, more precisely, EVs .

“No one's ever built a car in three pieces then fit them together at the end,” Farley says. “We build the front, rear, and middle. We build the whole middle, front, and the rear—and then, at the end, we put it together. No one's ever built a car that way.”

That approach stands in stark contrast to the usual way cars are made: pieced together bit by bit on a linear production line, one at a time, with engineers contorting themselves into tight spaces workstation after workstation.

Splitting the EV into three complete parts is potentially game-changing in terms of both speed and cost. In Ford's new system