Ford’s $30,000 EV Truck Will Offer All-Wheel Drive After All

• Ford’s upcoming $30,000 electric pickup won’t be limited to a rear-wheel drive setup
• Dual-motor all-wheel drive is also coming to the affordable EV truck.
• The automaker’s EV chief also confirmed that multiple battery options will be available.

Ford’s upcoming affordable mid-size electric pickup truck, which doesn’t have a name or a confirmed reveal date, is making headlines once again–and for good reason.

Set to go into production next year, we thought the four-door EV would only be offered with a rear-wheel drive configuration, as implied by Ford’s CEO Jim Farley. That would have been a bit of a letdown for people who need all-wheel drive for fun or because they live in areas where it snows frequently.

Doug Field at Ford’s EV event in Louisville, Kentucky.

Photo by: Ford

But that assumption was wrong, as Doug Field, Ford’s head of EVs, confirmed for MotorTrend that the upcoming $30,000 electric pickup will also be offered with a dual-motor all-wheel drive setup at launch. The rear wheels will use a permanent-magnet motor, while AWD models will add an induction motor that drives the front axle.

What’s more, Ford claims that these motors, which will be built in-house, will be the cheapest in the world, allowing the blue oval automaker to keep the costs down and the selling price low.

Field also said that the unnamed EV will be available with multiple battery options, allowing buyers to choose between a lower price and a longer range. However, we still don’t know what those capacities are, and whether or not the biggest pack would make the first model based on Ford’s Universal EV Platform a true all-rounder.

I expect the cheapest option, which is slated to start from $30,000, to be powered by a lithium iron phosphate (LFP) pack, but it’s too early to know for sure. Ford said during a media briefing back in August of last year that it’s aiming for a battery that’s approximately 15% smaller than that of the Chinese-made BYD Atto electric crossover, which amounts to roughly 51 kilowatt-hours of energy, by our calculations.

That said, nobody–except Ford–knows what will slot above and below this pack, so it’s anyone’s guess at this point. What we do know is that both lithium iron phosphate (LFP) and nickel manganese cobalt (NMC) chemistries will be supported by the automaker’s new EV platform, with batteries rated at 400 volts instead of 800 volts to keep costs down.

Whatever the capacity, CEO Jim Farley was adamant that the new mid-size electric truck will be able to export energy from its battery to power an entire house. The discontinued F-150 Lightning had the same functionality, and it proved its worth during hurricanes and power outages, so it’s great to know that an entry-level EV will offer the same feature for a lot less money.

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