Ford cuts Mustang Mach-E production costs by $1,000 by adopting Tesla's continuous improvement model

Tesla is well known for making continuous improvements to their vehicles and adding features on the fly.

The approach is that of unlike legacy automakers, who wait for model year or mid-cycle updates to implement changes in design or features.

At least one of those legacy automakers has realized the benefit of Tesla’s approach, and have implemented a similar approach, one that has already reaped financial benefits for the company.

That company is Ford, which last year convened a task force made up of the Mustang Mach-Es purchasing, manufacturing, and engineering teams.

According to Automotive News, the team studied competitor products, gathered input from social media, and data from their fleet of vehicles to eliminate $1,000 in Mach-E production costs.

One of the ways in which that figure was reached was by reducing the number of piece of the Mach-Es frunk from nine to two.

But they were also able to achieve a reduction by actually adding a feature – heated seats to the California Route 1 edition.

“It turns out people love heated seats, and they use them in an EV instead of the heated ventilation, so we standardized the heated seats and took out the other one. We got a better price because we got more volume. It was complexity reduction and building scale, which means we got them much cheaper,” said Darren Palmer, Ford’s general manager of battery-electric vehicles.

According to Palmer, they also simplified the cooling system in the Mach-E, reducing the amount of cooling hoses and the number of motors from four to two.

This piece of advice likely came from Sandy Munro, who called the Mach-E’s Thermal System a ‘nightmare’ during a teardown last year.

While Ford has been able to reduce Mach-E production costs, they have not committed to passing those savings on to consumers.

“Over time, our goal is to make all of our electric vehicles better and better value to get to more and more people,” Palmer said. “Market conditions also set the prices. At the moment, there’s a huge scarcity of products, and that’s also setting the prices. We evaluate those every month as to where we are.”

Ford doesn’t plan on only implementing this process with the Mach-E, but carry it on for the upcoming F-150 Lightning, E-Transit, and other future EVs.