Ford’s EV transition made combustion engineers expendable

One summer season morning in 2021,Lem Yeung opened an e mail from Ford’s HR division. He stared at his display screen. Yeung, a mechanical engineer, had labored on internal-combustion-engine improvement at Ford for 30 years, the precise tenure that made him eligible for the beneficiant retirement package deal that Detroit’s automobile firms have lengthy provided. The son of Chinese language immigrants, Yeung was additionally a part of Ford power-train lineage—each of his mother and father additionally had been engineers who developed engines on the iconic firm.

This text is customized from the creator’s new e-book Inevitable: Inside the Messy, Unstoppable Transition to Electric Vehicles (Harvard Enterprise Assessment Press, 2025)Harvard Enterprise Assessment Press

The e-mail was a buyout supply, coming amid one among Ford’s seemingly limitless belt-tightening cycles. The corporate was
transitioning to electric vehicles, nevertheless it trailed GM in profitability, and Ford’s chief government, Jim Farley, was making an attempt to clamp down on prices. Since being named the CEO in August 2020, Farley had been dropping hints to traders and Wall Avenue analysts that the old-guard power-train engineers can be making room for EV specialists.

“ICE [internal-combustion-engine] expertise and BEV [battery-electric-vehicle] digital expertise are totally different,” Farley
said at an investor convention in February 2022. “You possibly can’t ask ICE individuals to do sure issues. It takes too lengthy.”

If Yeung agreed to retire early, the corporate would kick in a number of extra months of wage along with retirement pay. For a lot of eligible Ford vets, it may need been a no brainer. However Yeung was solely 52. If he accepted, what would he do for the ultimate decade of his profession?

Then once more, Yeung’s job within the previous few years had turn out to be a lot much less satisfying.

Ford’s Energy-Prepare Engineering Legacy

For many of his profession, the world of engine improvement at Ford was so massive and bustling, Yeung felt like he labored inside the corporate’s nerve middle. His first job on the automaker had been inside a Nineteen Twenties wood-paneled constructing in Dearborn, Mich.—just some miles from the historic dwelling of founder Henry Ford—the place a whole bunch of power-train engineers toiled away on generations of Ford engines.

He later managed the design and launch of a menacingly named V-8 diesel engine: the 6.7-liter Energy Stroke “Scorpion,” the beast utilized in Ford’s award-winning Tremendous Responsibility pickup. He was concerned in lots of tasks spanning the engine spectrum, from a tiny four-banger utilized in China to the Vulcan 3.0-liter V-6 engine for ’90s-era Ranger pickups.

Ford power-train engineer Lem Yeung liked engaged on engines due to their immense complexity. Lem Yeung

With short-cropped darkish hair and an athletic construct, Yeung is a little bit of an iconoclast, not afraid to spout his opinions or query a supervisor. He tends to sprinkle his conversations with f-bombs. He liked engaged on engines due to their immense complexity, which demanded improvisation and fostered an entrepreneurial method to fixing issues. He’s seen it a whole bunch of occasions: keen younger engineering grads exhibiting up at Ford, prepared to use their math and pc calculations to their duties. However engine work, Yeung defined, includes much more trial and error and nuance than one may anticipate. Growing and refining automobile engines all the time presents grey areas, judgment calls, and a shocking quantity of going along with your intestine.

Early in his profession, Yeung would arrive every morning at a calibration-testing middle, the place he’d sit within the driver’s seat with a pc display screen and analyze information together with engine velocity, ignition spark, and air stress. He would tweak the inputs again and again after which transfer onto the subsequent automobile. Later he would use a spreadsheet to give you averages—information that may be routed to groups engaged on new variations of the engine.

“I imply, like, f***, I don’t know the way a lot spark. Nobody’s instructing me. I needed to study later, proper? Stress 10 levels after prime lifeless middle. The place the preignition factors are. All that stuff is trial and error. You study as you go,” he stated. “I used to be all the time anxious about bombing out the engine. It was scary. It was tremendous cool.”

Ford CEO Jim Farley’s Imaginative and prescient for an EV Transition

In the end, the choices made by power-train engineers have an effect on a whole bunch of 1000’s of future automobile patrons, who will, for years, expertise the residing, respiration engine the engineers created. Yeung remembers being wired by the job early on, envisioning all of the methods through which he might screw it up. “I used to be freaking out as a result of whenever you get out of college and also you’ve grown up as an engineer and amongst engineers, you wish to be good, proper? However you notice that’s not actual engineering.”

He was so anxious that, in opposition to his higher judgment, he confided in his boss, an old-school, Harley-Davidson rider with a sink-or-swim administration model. To his shock, it helped. His boss stated: “You understand, somebody advised me this as soon as, and I’m going to cross it on to you, as a result of I keep in mind all the time being so afraid of f-ing issues up: ‘In the event you’re not breakin’ one thing, you aren’t doing nuthin!’ ” Inspired by that pep discuss, Yeung realized to like his job.

By the point that HR e mail hit his pc display screen, the enjoyable occasions had pale, Yeung stated. New engine applications—those that unleashed all that creativity and collaboration amongst engineers—had dried up. Although EVs on the time accounted for a tiny sliver of Ford’s enterprise, many of the cash, sources, and vitality was being channeled into growing plug-in fashions.

Ford’s Rouge Electric Vehicle Middle is the primary Ford plant to maneuver autos utilizing robotic autonomous guided autos as an alternative of conventional in-floor conveyor traces. A lot of legacy automobile firms’ sources are being channeled into the event of plug-in fashions, regardless that EVs nonetheless account for a fraction of car gross sales.Ford

Farley, a rookie CEO, was making daring proclamations about Ford’s EV ambitions in an effort to erase the notion that the corporate had fallen behind. He was hiring engineers from Silicon Valley, from locations like Apple and Google—and sure, from Tesla. Conventional power-train engineers, who for thus lengthy rode a conveyor belt from Midwestern engineering schools like Michigan State and Purdue straight into Ford, had been being purchased out, let go, or marginalized. At Ford, the internal-combustion engine was nonetheless paying the payments—F-150 pickup vehicles, many with growling V-8 engines like Yeung’s Energy Stroke Scorpion, had been producing many of the firm’s revenue. Nevertheless it was clear that EV and battery specialists—chemists and coders—had been the brand new rock stars.

Yeung initially thought he had an ally within the new CEO. “I used to be so excited to have Jim Farley up there. I believed, ‘Oh my God, a automobile man! A dude who races on a regular basis and reads Jalopnik,’ ” Yeung recalled, referencing the favored
car-enthusiast website. “However man, he disrespected all of the engineers so unhealthy. I discover it extremely hurtful.”

Inside-Combustion Engines: a Energy-Prepare Engineer’s Playground

The inner-combustion engine, at a primary degree, converts gasoline and air into mechanical vitality, particularly torque, which is what turns the wheels. It begins with gasoline and air contained in the automobile’s cylinders; smaller automobiles could have 4 cylinders; bigger or sportier ones may need six or eight. Inside a cylinder, a spark ignites the air-and-fuel combination, thrusting down a piston contained in the cylinder to get issues shifting.

That symphony of exquisitely timed mini explosions contained in the cylinders units the wheels in movement, however solely after an intricate chain response of mechanical actions. The pistons thrusting up and down are connected to connecting rods, which connect to a crankshaft. The crankshaft, in flip, makes use of the vitality despatched to it and converts it into rotational movement, propelling the wheels. That’s the elementary-school rationalization; there are myriad different elements—piston rings, flywheels, rocker arms, exhaust manifolds—that do their piece. In trendy automobiles, that complete course of is orchestrated by computer systems—small electronic-control models that assist optimize all these actions.

Alongside the chain, there’s quite a bit that may go improper. There’s additionally quite a bit that may be tweaked—incrementally, methodically—to make it higher, to eke out only a bit extra energy, to make issues run a bit extra easily or use a bit much less gasoline. That’s a giant a part of the attraction for power-train engineers like Yeung: the intricacies of the internal-combustion engine allowed for nearly limitless innovation and problem-solving. It’s rewarding work.

Lem Yeung helped design the second and third generations of the 6.7-liter Energy Stroke “Scorpion” engine utilized in Ford’s Tremendous Responsibility vehicles. Ford

The gasoline engines Yeung labored on have a whole bunch of shifting elements; an electrical drivetrain has fewer than 25. An EV consists of a giant battery pack, usually with a whole bunch of rechargeable lithium-ion cells and usually tucked underneath the cabin flooring, sending energy to an inverter, in regards to the dimension of a small suitcase. The inverter modifications the electrical energy from the battery from direct current to alternating present. That energy is then fed into an electric motor, or generally a number of motors for further energy or to provide all-wheel drive.

The electrical motors are additionally fairly easy, and so they pull off a nifty trick that does away with the necessity for the complicated, multigear transmission utilized in ICE automobiles. In a fuel engine, most acceleration or torque is achieved solely in a slender band of working velocity earlier than the engine dangers spiking over its revolutions-per-minute restrict, which may trigger it to fail. That’s the place a transmission is available in: Handing off that torque from first gear to second, or second to 3rd, and so forth, retains an optimum stability between all that energy coming from the engine and the way shortly the wheels are rotating. The engine can ship sooner speeds solely because it strikes up the gears.

In an EV, an electrical motor can basically take the same quantity of vitality as produced by a fuel or diesel engine, however use it much more effectively, eliminating the necessity for gears. Electrical motors ship most torque throughout all speeds. That’s why most individuals discover EVs so enjoyable to drive: That energy thrust is there the moment the foot hits the pedal. The acceleration is clean, with out these minipauses that come from a conventional transmission shifting gears.
Automobile and Driver’s 2008 review of Tesla’s first automobile, the Roadster, sums it up this fashion: “Much more spectacular is the moment acceleration at real-world speeds of 30 to 100 mph. Squeeze the throttle, and the Tesla surges ahead with easy ease.”

Yeung isn’t anti-EV. As a automobile man, he’s pushed loads of them and is aware of the push that on the spot torque produces. His criticism is that, from his standpoint as an ICE specialist, EVs are, nicely, boring. They don’t require any of that futzing round with air-to-fuel ratios, spark timing, and valve-train tweaking that Yeung and numerous different auto engineers have tinkered on for greater than a century. Yeung says he and lots of of his power-train friends might adapt their abilities to work on EVs. However that work would contain little of the ingenuity and creativity that he had come to like on the planet of fuel and diesel engines.

“With an electrical motor, there’s actually not that a lot to it,” he stated. “It’s now not an artwork type.”

A Clandestine Ford Escape Engine Improve

Yeung graduated from Purdue College in 1991, within the enamel of a recession. He utilized for a number of positions at energy firms and was turned down by all of them. Ultimately he landed an internship at Ford, and his work ethic and creativity bought him observed. He caught wind of an worker vehicle-lease program that required managers to fill out a survey once they swapped automobiles. Yeung figured that may be a treasure trove of knowledge that might assist automobile builders, however no person was doing something with the info. “To me that was loopy,” Yeung stated. “We have now all these engineers filling out detailed surveys in regards to the high quality and options of those automobiles. There’s bought to be some nice sh-t in there.” Yeung went and accessed the info—which on the time, within the early Nineteen Nineties, required cracking right into a mainframe pc—and delivered a thick report of what he discovered to a vice chairman.

One in all Yeung’s favourite engine-development tasks underscores the myriad prospects that power-train engineers must toy with. Round 2005, Yeung appeared over Ford’s improvement plan for the three.0-liter engine that was used within the Escape compact SUV and the midsize Fusion household sedan—two of Ford’s prime U.S. sellers. Yeung did a double take. No engine upgrades had been deliberate. Usually you’d anticipate some form of enhancement each few years to maintain these autos aggressive. However right here, for 2 of Ford’s best-selling autos, the engines weren’t altering.

At Ford, the internal-combustion engine was nonetheless paying the payments. Nevertheless it was clear that EV and battery specialists—chemists and coders—had been the brand new rock stars.

That was bizarre, and Yeung couldn’t determine why Ford would try this. Wanting again, he suspects it most likely had quite a bit to do with the monetary place of Detroit’s automakers as Toyota and Honda continued to develop. On the time, although, all Yeung knew was that the auto business by no means sleeps; absolutely the Escape’s rivals, just like the Toyota RAV4 or the Honda CR-V, can be getting engine upgrades. Advertising and marketing within the automobile enterprise is fueled by no matter new or enhanced automobile attributes might be touted in multimillion-dollar promoting campaigns. Automobile manufacturers wish to tout extra horsepower, higher fuel economy, a smoother experience, or a much bigger touchscreen.

“Are you positive that’s a good suggestion?” Yeung requested his boss of the nonexistent engine plans. “That is going into two of our cornerstone autos.” His inquiries had been principally ignored. So Yeung determined to freelance an engine improve in his spare time.

He recalibrated the engine—fidgeting with a better horsepower by adjusting the valve practice, getting extra air into the combustion chamber. That required longer, higher-pressure consumption runners—a channel that funnels as a lot of the air-and-fuel combination into the cylinder as doable. Yeung jury-rigged a mock-up of his idea and located it labored, however he would want greater than that to maneuver ahead. He wanted to verify the modifications wouldn’t solely increase the engine’s horsepower, but in addition eke out a bit extra effectivity and keep a clean drive.

Yeung knew he wanted a combustion skilled—somebody to determine the exact air-and-fuel ratio that may ship probably the most punch as effectively as doable. Probably the greatest at Ford was
Steve Penkevich, an organization lifer and native of Michigan’s rural Higher Peninsula, whose title was “combustion technical specialist.” Yeung barely knew Penkevich, who was about 5 years older and had been at Ford longer. When he approached him to gauge curiosity within the stealth challenge, Penkevich jumped on the likelihood.

Penkevich was each bit the power-train zealot as Yeung—at one level he labored on observe simulations for Ford’s NASCAR racing engines. A mid-cycle improve to an engine that goes right into a household automobile was, on paper, far much less thrilling. However to not Penkevich. “That’s the form of challenge the place the gasoline in your blood begins pumping,” he would say years later.

Penkevich remembers the joys of gathering a ragtag staff of power-train engineers right into a nondescript convention room to hash over methods for reinforcing the Fusion engine’s efficiency. “I believe I do know precisely find out how to change that cylinder head if you wish to get extra energy out of it,” he recollects saying. “And I believe we will do it with out making a giant tear-up.” Energy-train strategizing periods like that, he recollects, had been like “watching
The Big Bang Concept—plenty of like-minded guys all breaking into geek discuss, and all making an attempt to unravel the identical downside.”

In the long run, the challenge was barely a blip within the annals of automotive product improvement: It boosted the Fusion’s output by roughly 40 horsepower, to 240 hp (30 kilowatts, to 180 kW), which was nonetheless beneath that of rival midsize sedans, however a minimum of extra aggressive. Penkevich was so pleased with it, his spouse was nonetheless driving an Escape with that engine 12 years later.

Yeung was simply blissful he lastly bought buy-in for his under-the-radar challenge. “Candy, I didn’t get fired,” he remembers considering.

Ford and GM Duel Over EV Funding

When Yeung bought the buyout e mail from HR, electrical autos had been nonetheless barely noticeable on the U.S. automotive gross sales charts. At GM, Volkswagen, Ford, and different massive automobile firms, EVs accounted for lower than 2 p.c of gross sales—and so they had been cash losers. Total, simply 3 p.c of all U.S. new-car gross sales had been totally electrical fashions, and Tesla accounted for roughly three-quarters of these. To the outsider, the electric-car revolution appeared like an summary, faraway thought.

And but, contained in the automobile firms, the laborious pivot to electrics was in full swing and upending a century of inner order. A era of engineers like Yeung had been feeling stress. In 2018, Ford executives
boasted that they’d dole out US $11 billion over the subsequent few years to develop electric cars. In 2020, GM said it could make investments $20 billion in EVs, together with driverless tech. Ford a 12 months later said $30 billion. GM came back with $35 billion. Ford in early 2022 upped the ante but once more, to $50 billion.

Growing a brand new engine program can value a whole bunch of thousands and thousands of {dollars}, even north of $1 billion, and contain a whole bunch of suppliers. In accordance with analysis agency S&P International Mobility, in 2011, automobile firms globally rolled out virtually 70 new engine households—a base engine that can be utilized as the inspiration for a number of variants. By 2018, the variety of new engine households was 20. In 2021, it was 5. The analysis agency anticipated the quantity to achieve zero this decade, that means nearly no engines are being designed from scratch. Certain, fuel and diesel engines shall be in showrooms for just a few many years to return. And gas-electric hybrids are
going to figure more prominently on this transition than many carmakers had anticipated even simply a few years in the past. However the expectation is that automobile firms will cease sinking cash into the machine that they’d spent a century working to good.

The business’s EV push is reversing a collective resolution made greater than a century in the past, when electrics competed with internal-combustion autos and even steam-powered automobiles to turn out to be the facility practice of alternative for the automobile enterprise. Across the flip of the twentieth century, automobiles powered by electrical motors outnumbered these operating on gasoline within the United States. It was like a higher-stakes model of Betamax versus VHS videotape.

An article from the July 1900 difficulty of
The Vehicle Journal delved into the contradictions of electrical automobiles in a method that’s eerily modern: “In cleanliness, ease of administration and security, it has very best qualities,” it learn. “Its nice value, its extreme weight and the assorted shortcomings of the storage battery, along with its extraordinarily restricted radius, mix to restrict its subject to sure types of city use.”

By the early 1900s, the reliability and high quality of fuel engines had improved with improvements like the electrical starter and ignition system, each invented by engineer Charles F. Kettering, who grew to become the longtime head of analysis at GM. And although fuel stations had been simply rising, {hardware} shops offered cans of petroleum. In the meantime, electricity generation exterior massive cities was scarce, and motorists with electrical automobiles had range anxiety.

New Engine Growth Dwindles

Gasoline engines gained out. Henry Ford’s assembly-line improvements dramatically drove down the price of automobile meeting. That made his mass-produced gas-engine Mannequin Ts far cheaper than the electrical automobiles offered by dozens of upstart firms. As highway methods improved, People needed to journey additional, which additionally favored fuel automobiles.

Within the ensuing many years, generations of power-train engineers around the globe toiled to refine the machine that powered international transportation. They made the internal-combustion engine extra highly effective, smoother, extra responsive, extra compact—and critically, extra gasoline environment friendly.

Over the many years, attributes like engine dimension, form, and even how an engine was cooled—air or water—grew to become grist for legendary debates amongst automobile fans. Names like Jaguar’s straight-six engine and Chevrolet’s small-block V-8 denoted the scale and format of the engine’s cylinders, but in addition grew to become highly effective manufacturers unto themselves. Automobile firms constructed complete advertising campaigns round their engines, with names just like the Cadillac Northstar and the Dodge Hemi.

The facility practice was as soon as so central to a automobile model’s identification that, for many years, GM operated separate engine-development divisions for many of its manufacturers. The concept was that, if the engine was the center of the auto, then every model ought to have its personal bespoke motors, a minimum of for bigger, costlier automobiles. In 1965, GM provided greater than 25 totally different fuel engines throughout its Chevrolet, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, and Buick manufacturers, practically all developed, examined, and manufactured individually from each other.

Ultimately, even GM—for a lot of the twentieth century the world’s largest and most worthwhile company—got here round to the cost-cutting revelation that its manufacturers might share elements and even complete engines with out automobile homeowners noticing. By the mid-Nineteen Seventies, GM had quietly begun joint engine improvement amongst its manufacturers, sharing elements and in some circumstances utilizing basically the identical engine in automobiles from totally different marques. That saved cash, however again then, the notion of the engine being central to the automobile’s identification was so ingrained in shoppers’ minds that the invention of GM’s transfer boiled over right into a PR disaster.

GM’s Oldsmobile Delta 88 sparked outrage in 1977 when it got here to gentle that the corporate had changed the automobile’s V-8 engine with a down-market Chevy engine of the identical dimension—an early signal of engine consolidation within the auto business. Previous to that, GM had been working separate engine-development divisions for many of its manufacturers. Greg Gjerdingen/Wikipedia

In 1977, a Chicago man named Joseph Siwek introduced his Oldsmobile Delta 88 massive sedan in for engine work. His mechanic ordered just a few substitute elements, however once they got here in, he found that a few of them didn’t match. Ultimately it was decided that the 350-cubic-inch-displacement V-8 engine in his Oldsmobile was the truth is a down-market Chevy engine of the identical dimension. GM was sued for false promoting, triggering nationwide information protection of GM’s “engine scandal” and a multiyear authorized headache. Ultimately, a federal jury awarded some Oldsmobile homeowners $550 refunds, costing GM about $8 million.

That didn’t cease the consolidation although. The 25 totally different engines GM utilized in 1965 are gone. Within the mid-2020s, the corporate makes use of fewer than a dozen totally different fuel and diesel engines for all its U.S. automobiles right this moment.

BYD and Tesla Electrical Automobile Gross sales Shocked Incumbents

Yeung was only one soldier in a military of power-train engineers whose collective problem-solving talents and earnest sleuthing helped evolve the internal-combustion engine and clear up among the business’s most vexing engineering challenges.

The U.S. Clear Air Act in 1970 required automobile firms to scale back the pollution that their tailpipes had been spewing. Catalytic converters had been added to scale back poisonous fumes. New injection methods had been developed to spray gasoline immediately into the engine’s combustion chamber, boosting energy and effectivity. Corporations added extra gears to transmissions to assist engines run extra optimally, additionally saving gasoline. Ultimately, hybrid gas-electric automobiles, popularized by the Toyota Prius, developed within the late Nineteen Nineties, deployed a small battery pack and electrical motor to considerably improve gasoline financial system.

For the 2022 mannequin 12 months, U.S. autos averaged 26.4 miles per gallon (9 liters per 100 kilometers)—roughly double from 13.1 mpg for 1975 fashions, in accordance with Environmental Safety Company information. The quantity of greenhouse-gas-producing carbon dioxide that U.S. autos belched out was roughly lower in half per automobile over that interval, the EPA says, a lot of it because of power-train engineers.

By the late 2010s, automobile executives had been going through tightening rules globally. Carbon-emissions guidelines in Europe had gotten so strict that some automakers had been being threatened with fines of $100 million or extra in the event that they couldn’t enhance their emissions. Auto execs had been concluding that they’d by no means have the ability to wring sufficient efficiencies from the internal-combustion engine to fulfill the foundations in the long term.

At Ford, that sentiment wouldn’t have come as any shock to Yeung. He had seen all the brand new engine applications dry up. It made him uneasy, not nearly his personal future, however about the way forward for Ford, the corporate that had sustained him and his household for greater than 50 years.

In Yeung’s view, the power to engineer, refine, and produce fuel and diesel energy trains was the key sauce of the auto business for a century. It was so complicated, you needed to be among the many greatest companies on the planet, with the deepest of pockets, to do it at scale. It gave the large automobile firms large obstacles to entry that allowed them to function for many years with nearly no newcomers. There basically had been no startups of word, till Tesla, 100 years into the automobile enterprise, when it began promoting refined electrical sedans with head-turning designs direct to shoppers.

Now, as Ford and different U.S. automakers pivot to electrics, they’re competing with massive gamers around the globe like Samsung, LG, and Panasonic, that are massive canine in batteries. Electrical motors are largely the area of Asian gamers massive and small, together with Japan’s Nidec Corp. and lots of low-cost choices in China. The stuff is comparatively simple to place collectively right into a automobile package deal. Some automobile execs have in contrast it to snapping a Lego set collectively.

Yeung is just not satisfied the incumbent automobile firms can set up sufficient experience in EVs to remain on prime. They’re dropping their aggressive benefit, their experience. They’re dropping guys like Lem Yeung and Steve Penkevich. The built-in benefits that the incumbent carmakers wielded for greater than a century are disappearing as automobiles turn out to be much less mechanical and extra infused with complicated software program. They’re coming into a race through which they’re ranging from behind, with firms that endure none of their legacy drag. Tesla and China’s ascendant BYD—and a slew of different Chinese language EV upstarts—are outmaneuvering the GMs and Volkswagens on lower-cost battery setups and consumer-friendly tech options. Considering like a automobile firm has flipped to turn out to be an obstacle.

“EV know-how is just not that troublesome. It’s simply modular,” Yeung says. “Ford can study to construct and home their batteries and their motors, however actually, the innovation degree on a motor and the power to do it uniquely versus an engine? They gained’t have the ability to do it cheaply sufficient. I don’t suppose the auto business goes to innovate in battery know-how or electrical motors. I believe all of the obstacles to entry have gone.”

Yeung had come to those conclusions lengthy earlier than that HR e mail landed atop his inbox. His buddy Steve Penkevich had concluded the identical, having taken early retirement eight months earlier, in December 2020, at age 59.

Yeung clicked settle for.