Ford is closing the chapter on its “startup inside a carmaker” approach to electrification. The Detroit automaker announced that Doug Field, the former Tesla and Apple executive hired in 2021 to lead its EV transformation, will leave the company voluntarily next month.
The move is embedded in Ford’s decision to dissolve its standalone EV and digital organization, which Field was tasked with building. Instead, it will absorb it into a broader unit that also covers manufacturing, supply chain, and gasoline- and hybrid-vehicle programs.
Universal EV Platform
When Field arrived at Ford, Tesla’s rise had rattled every traditional automaker into believing that Silicon Valley cultural DNA was the only answer for the automotive future.
Ford CEO Jim Farley backed that conviction and restructured the company into two clearly separated businesses: Model e for electric vehicles, and Ford Blue for its combustion lineup. Field ran Model e.
An impressive list of accomplishments marks his tenure. He brought America’s pickup truck to the market, the F-150 Lightning, and was also responsible for the Mustang Mach-E, which gave Ford a head start in battery-powered passenger cars.
Furthermore, he developed the BlueCruise driver-assistance platform, which is on track for Level 3 eyes-off capability by 2028. In its current format, it is allowed for hands-free driving on selected stretches of highway in Belgium.
Fiels also supervised the construction of the Universal EV Platform from the ground up. The first vehicle built on that architecture, a $30,000 midsize pickup destined for Louisville Assembly in 2027, uses LFP batteries, unibody construction, and aerodynamics that Ford claims are 15% superior to those of a rival pickup.
Genuine achievements
Those are genuine achievements. Yet, the broader Model e experiment has been unraveling for some time. Ford canceled the pure-battery version of the F-150 Lightning, replacing it with an EREV range-extender variant. A planned three-row electric SUV was shelved before production. Now the separate-entity structure itself has been dismantled.
Ford’s Model e division lost $4.8 billion (€4.1 billion) in 2025. A fraction better than the $5.1 billion (€4.3 billion) it burned through in 2024, but still a staggering figure for a unit that generated $6.7 billion (€5.7 billion) in revenue. Since the division was carved out in 2022, it has accumulated more than $16 billion (€13.6 billion) in losses.
A manufacturing veteran takes the wheel
The new organization is called Product Creation and Industrialization. It is led by COO Kumar Galhotra, a longtime Ford manufacturing and industrial executive. It merges EV development, design, and software with engineering, supply chain, cycle planning, and vehicle production, which had previously operated as separate groups.
Galhotra’s stated objective is sharper, faster decision-making as Ford targets 8% profit margins by 2029. That goal comes with concrete product commitments: a refresh of 80% of the North American portfolio and 70% of the global portfolio by volume within the same timeframe.
Electrified powertrains on nearly 90% of global nameplates by 2030, and updated electrical architectures with over-the-air capability on 90% of the vehicles it sells by the end of the decade.
What comes next?
Field himself offered no specifics about his next move, though he indicated plans to channel what he learned across Apple, Tesla, and Ford into something new.
His track record is hard to dismiss: he helped engineer the Tesla Model 3, oversaw Apple’s secretive vehicle program before it was abandoned, and now leaves Ford with a production-ready low-cost EV platform that did not exist when he arrived. Ford says it still believes in EVs, but no longer in the approach of a separate, Tesla-mimicking unit.
