Haha. For us who watched Munro’s teardown, this is old news!
One thing I didn't see in that CNN article is what I've heard around here: That Ford is losing money on every Mach-E that they're selling.
This brings up Musk's quote: "Anybody can build a prototype. Building a car for volume production is
hard."
From the looks of things, the Mach-E isn't precisely a prototype. But the changes that need to be made in the car to bring the costs into line have yet to be done. (Although I'm sure that Ford Engineering is sweating bricks on the subject right now.) The idea is to get
something out the door so the company doesn't become completely irrelevant to consumers in the near term.
One of the things that Munro pointed out was the re-use of Standard Components from Ford's internal orderbook. Where Tesla, in the ramp-up, would design and build a Widget that did three (or five or six) related jobs all at once, Ford, in the mad dash to get something, anything out the door, used numbers of single-function devices to make up the same functionality as Tesla's one Widget. In this case, it wasn't just the multiple parts that were Evil: To hook all the parts together one needed hoses and wires, control circuits, mounting brackets, and so on. And since the problems weren't just in One Thing (like, say, cooling), but in multiple systems, one has the additional problems, cost, and design complexity of shoehorning all this stuff into a car. I'd say it's a miracle that Ford pulled it off in the first place. Which is nice, but then I direct the crowd to Musk's Quote, above.
And if any of you haven't seen the scene in Munro's tear-down video of the front end of the Mach-E, where he faints in shock and gets revived by an
Octovalve, now would be the time.
(And, yes, that video and others on the Mach-E were some of the reasons why the SO and I went for a Model Y a year and some ago.)
