Ford has announced that it will produce a brand new electric pickup truck in its new factory in the USA. It is stated that this vehicle, called “Project T3” for now, will come with groundbreaking features.
Automobile giant Ford shared new information about the giant electric vehicle factory it plans to establish in Tennessee, USA today. One of them was a new electric pickup truck called “Project T3” for now.
The new facility, which Ford calls “BlueOval City”, will start its operations in 2025. The company says its new factory will house both a vehicle manufacturing and battery assembly facility. It goes without saying that the new pickup truck will be produced here.
Details about Project T3 are quite scarce for now. However, the incoming information is enough to get excited about the car. The new pickup truck, which will debut in 2025, will sit alongside vehicles such as the Mustang Mach-E, the F-150 Lightning and the recently introduced European all-electric Ford Explorer.
The company’s current electric pick-up, the F-150 Lightning, has very similar features to its internal combustion sibling. However, it is stated that the new pickup truck can offer much different things in terms of both performance and design. Farley adds that Project T3 will be a fully upgradeable and ever-changing model.
We can say that the range of the new pickup truck will increase significantly due to the improvement of efficiency. The F-150 Lightning offers a range of up to 514 kilometers on a single charge. It is said that this number can reach around 643 kilometers in the new pickup truck.
CEO Jim Farley made Elon Musk-like statements in a statement to Bloomberg. Regarding the autonomous driving technology that will be included in the new truck, which he describes as a groundbreaking product, Farley said: “You will be able to search, sleep or do whatever you want while driving on the road on a sunny day, while your truck is driving itself.”
If this kind of system is really as it is said, it will offer much more advanced things than the BlueCruise driver assistant feature that Ford is currently using. BlueCruise allows you to take your hands off the wheel by offering things like steering, braking and acceleration. But drivers need to be ready to take back control and keep their eyes on the road.
Nowadays, it is not possible to buy a fully self-driving vehicle. Although Elon Musk has said that such Teslas will come for years, the technology was still not ready. It was seen that the prototype currently offered to Tesla customers was still causing problems.
Ford, which has successful electric cars such as the F-150 Lightning and Mustang Mach-E, has been after Tesla, the world’s largest electric car manufacturer, for a long time. Experts predict it can do this by 2025 and surpass Musk’s company in sales. Let’s add that Ford is the second-highest selling electric vehicle company in the United States in 2022.
Farley also said in his statements last year, “We plan to challenge Tesla and others to become the world’s largest electric vehicle manufacturer.” The new pickup truck is expected to assist the company in achieving this goal.
Ford aims to produce 500,000 electric pickup trucks annually at its $5.6 billion BlueOval City factory, which it has equipped with the latest technologies, and wants to start production within the next 30 months. In addition, the company has recently started working to increase Mustang Mach-E production to 210,000 units by the end of 2023. On the other hand, the production of the F-150 Lightning was planned to be tripled to 150,000 by the end of this year.