Ford’s Radical Fathom Electric Uses A Tesla Trick To Turn 146 Parts Into 2

Giant aluminum castings are Ford’s secret weapon to slash build times and revolutionize affordable EV manufacturing.

The 2028 Ford Fathom is a fully electric compact truck that will cost just $29,945, but hitting that ambitious price target was no easy feat. To get there, Ford had to borrow an idea from Tesla — one not used for any other vehicle with a Blue Oval badge on its nose. We’re talking about Ford’s unicasting process, which is the equivalent of Tesla’s gigacasting. Unicastings are aluminum components that replace multiple smaller parts and massively shorten build times.

The Fathom has two unicastings (one for the front part of the truck and another for the rear), and Ford says these two parts replace what would be 146 structural components in a conventional vehicle’s construction.

It’s no secret that Ford is using a Tesla-style castings for the Fathom, but this week it explained a little more about the build steps, and the benefits. Ford also revealed that 5,000 units (enough for 2,500 trucks) have already been produced in preparation for the Fathom’s official debut next spring. The castings are produced at Ford’s Shelbyville Technical Center where each one starts life as an aluminum ingot. The ingots are fed into a furnace by an elevator and melted at 1,300 degrees Fahrenheit (700 degrees Celsius) before moving into a casting machine to become one of the two unicastings fitted to each truck.

Check, then check again

Passing a visual inspection isn’t the only hoop a casting has to jump through before it can be shipped to Ford’s Louisville Assembly Plant in Kentucky, where production Fathoms will be built. It also needs a full coordinate check in a climate-controlled room to make sure every dimension and hole location matches the official spec.

Then an industrial X-ray system checks the inside of the casting for defects like pores and voids, before an optical scanner gives the dimensions another once over. While this is happening, samples of the aluminum are undergoing tensile strength testing, and yet more checks analyze the chemical composition. Entire batches are not released to Louisville until every test is passed.

Once there, they’ll enter a radically different built process to the one Henry Ford instigated over a century ago. Instead of vehicles moving down one production line, they will be assembled in three distinct sub-sections to save time, only being united to form a truck late in the build cycle.

No doubt Ford will be issuing a molten aluminum-like drip-feed of other technical teasers between now and the Fathom’s debut early next year. We still have plenty to learn about the exterior design, the battery and charging setup, and what kind of range you can expect. But we do know that it will seat five, have more passenger space than a Toyota RAV4, offer bidirectional charging capabilities, and get to 60 mph (97 kph) in around 4.5 seconds.

Source: www.carscoops.com — article syndicated from the publisher’s feed; all rights remain with the original publisher.