engines and manufacturing; later she
pursued development and finance. More
than three years ago, she became chief
engineer for the gas F-150s, and began
the Lightning project.
I asked about the biggest engineering
challenges that Zhang and her team faced.
Power trains in electric cars have many
fewer moving parts than those in gas-
driven cars. Mechanically, they aren’t very
complicated; the basic technology—a
battery driving an electric motor—has
been around since the eighteen-thirties,
thirty years before internal-combustion
engines came along. Electric motors are
much smaller and more efficient than
combustion engines. Motors convert more
than eighty-five per cent of the energy
they receive from the battery into mo-
tion, whereas engines use less than half
of the energy produced by gasoline to
power the vehicle.
The motors may be small, but the
batteries aren’t. Zhang said that one of
the challenges was figuring out how to
fit a battery large enough for a target
range of two hundred and thirty miles
(this bumps up to three hundred miles
with an extended-range battery) with-
out having to change the shape of the
interior or “delete” the spare tire. “Once
you put the motor and the battery in,
where do you have room for the spare?”
She and her team found the room in a
redesign of the truck’s undercarriage.
Which part of the truck was Zhang
proudest of? That would be the frunk.
We got out to peer inside. “Four hun-
dred litres,” she said. “That’s a lot of beer.”
B
ill Ford, the company’s sixty-four-
year-old executive chairman, mused
about the long, circular path back to
electrification that the firm had taken
when I spoke to him in November. Ford
joined the family business in 1979, as a
product-planning analyst; he’s been the
chair of the board since 1999.
“Henry Ford worked for Thomas Ed-
ison,” he told me. In the early eighteen-
nineties, Henry, who was Bill’s great-
grandfather, was serving as the chief
engineer of Detroit’s Edison Illuminat-
ing Company, a local electricity plant,
while devoting his spare time to a “quadri-
cycle” with an internal-combustion en-
gine that ran on gasoline at a time when
most motorized transport was powered
by lead-acid batteries or steam.
In 1896, Ford attended a banquet for
Edison’s power-plant officers at the Ori-
ental Hotel, in Coney Island, Brooklyn.
After dinner, as Edison, then nearly fifty,
and his managers were discussing elec-
tric vehicles, Alex Dow, Ford’s boss at
the Detroit plant, pointed out his chief
engineer to Edison and said, “There’s a
young fellow who’s made a gas car.”
According to the account in “Tak-
ing Charge,” by Michael Brian Schiffer,
the thirty-three-year-old Ford, asked if
he wanted to meet Edison, said yes. The
two engineers sat together and discussed
Ford’s invention. Soon Edison began
pounding on the table, and cried, “Young
man, that’s the thing; you have it. Keep
at it! Electric cars must keep near to
power stations. The storage battery is
too heavy.... Your car is self-contained—
carries its own power plant.”
Edison had identified the problem
with E.V.s then, and it’s still the prob-
lem now. Gasoline has vastly more en-
ergy density than the best battery. About
twenty gallons of gasoline, which weighs
a hundred and twenty pounds or so, will
convey my gas F-150 around four hun-
dred miles: close to twice the target range
of the Lightning’s standard eighteen-
hundred-pound battery. Part of the early
appeal of the automobile, along with
the everyday freedoms it offered, lay in
“touring”—the ability to go long dis-
tances on a whim. Today, even though
most people use their cars for shorter
trips and fly longer distances, the mys-
tique of touring remains.
By 1903, Edison had apparently
changed his mind again about the power
source for automobiles. “Electricity is
the thing,” he told The Automobile that
year. “There are no whirring and grind-
ing gears with their numerous levers to
confuse. There is not that almost terri-
fying uncertain throb and whirr of the
powerful combustion engine. There is
no water circulating system to get out
of order, no dangerous and evil-smell-
ing gasoline, and no noise.”
In January, 1914, in an interview with
the New York Times, Henry Ford dis-
cussed a vehicle that he and Edison were
building together. “Within a year, I hope,
we shall begin the manufacture of an
electric automobile,” he said. Edison’s
“It turns out ‘Heaven South’ is just a made-up realtor’s term.”
