Last month we bought a used 2024 MINI Cooper SE; our first EV. The car is genuinely thrilling to drive: instant acceleration, zero lag. But what’s more interesting than the driving experience is why this car works while so many others don’t. The answer reveals a critical flaw in how most automakers have approached electrification.
I was reading this interview with Ford CEO Jim Farley and several points stood out. He talks about how COVID inflated car prices temporarily, and Ford mistook this spike for the new normal. But when the market corrected, EV prices stayed high—because Ford had over-engineered the vehicles to justify those inflated price points. He said, “our internal-combustion-engine prejudice was so high that we hadn’t designed the [electric] cars right.”
Ford should have taken a page from the BMW electrification playbook. The MINI brand is owned by BMW and a decade ago, BMW explored the EV market. They built the BMW i3. You might recognize it from its many appearances in Curb Your Enthusiasm. The story is that BMW wanted to make an electric car but they didn’t want to slap an electric engine in the gap and try. So they built a separate team to build an EV from the ground up. The result was the i3. Then they took what they learned from the i3 and instead of building a whole new series of cars, they modified some existing BMWs with electric motors as well as the MINI.
The Ford team, they started with the base cars and said, let’s make it electric. Jim says the following after they tore apart a Tesla, “We had prejudice…[Tesla] said, ‘Let’s design the vehicle for the lowest, smallest battery.’ Totally different approach.” They tried to skip the step where you learn about what makes an EV great. The prejudice is that the Ford car is already great, so we can just slap an electric engine under the hood and people will love it. Maybe, but not for 40% more money.
We have had the car for four weeks and each drive is better than the last. But we did not pay the new car price. We bought it used and it was half the price (incl. shipping it across the US). Electrification is the future; but automakers have to design cars to be electric from the ground up. Design the car for electrification first, cost second. Only then will the starting prices for new cars come down and everyone will get excited about driving electric.
Jim Farley on Ford’s Costly EV U-Turn and Its Full-Throttle Approach to Off-Roaders
Michael Montez 