Ford’s EV transition made combustion engineers expendable

One summer time morning in 2021,Lem Yeung opened an electronic mail from Ford’s HR division. He stared at his display. Yeung, a mechanical engineer, had labored on internal-combustion-engine growth at Ford for 30 years, the precise tenure that made him eligible for the beneficiant retirement bundle 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 dad and mom additionally have been engineers who developed engines on the iconic firm.

This text is customized from the creator’s new ebook Inevitable: Contained in the Messy, Unstoppable Transition to Electrical Autos (Harvard Enterprise Overview Press, 2025)Harvard Enterprise Overview Press

The e-mail was a buyout supply, coming amid one in all Ford’s seemingly limitless belt-tightening cycles. The corporate was
transitioning to electrical autos, 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 buyers and Wall Road 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 completely different,” Farley
mentioned at an investor convention in February 2022. “You possibly can’t ask ICE folks 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 growth at Ford was so huge and bustling, Yeung felt like he labored inside the corporate’s nerve middle. His first job on the automaker had been inside a Twenties wood-paneled constructing in Dearborn, Mich.—only a few miles from the historic dwelling of founder Henry Ford—the place tons of 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 initiatives 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 cherished 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 cherished engaged on engines due to their immense complexity, which demanded improvisation and fostered an entrepreneurial method to fixing issues. He’s seen it tons of of occasions: keen younger engineering grads exhibiting up at Ford, prepared to use their math and laptop calculations to their duties. However engine work, Yeung defined, includes way more trial and error and nuance than one would possibly count on. 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 and analyze knowledge together with engine pace, ignition spark, and air strain. 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—knowledge that will 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 educating 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 mentioned. “I used to be all the time apprehensive about bombing out the engine. It was scary. It was tremendous cool.”

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

Finally, the choices made by power-train engineers have an effect on tons of of hundreds of future automobile consumers, who will, for years, expertise the residing, respiration engine the engineers created. Yeung remembers being stressed by the job early on, envisioning all of the methods during which he may screw it up. “I used to be freaking out as a result of whenever you get out of faculty and also you’ve grown up as an engineer and amongst engineers, you need to be excellent, proper? However you notice that’s not actual engineering.”

He was so anxious that, towards 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 mentioned: “, 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 case you’re not breakin’ one thing, you aren’t doing nuthin!’ ” Inspired by that pep speak, Yeung realized to like his job.

By the point that HR electronic mail hit his laptop display, the enjoyable occasions had pale, Yeung mentioned. New engine packages—those that unleashed all that creativity and collaboration amongst engineers—had dried up. Despite the fact that EVs on the time accounted for a tiny sliver of Ford’s enterprise, many of the cash, sources, and power was being channeled into creating plug-in fashions.

Ford’s Rouge Electrical Automobile Middle is the primary Ford plant to maneuver autos utilizing robotic autonomous guided autos as a substitute 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 auto 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 colleges like Michigan State and Purdue straight into Ford, have 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, have been producing many of the firm’s revenue. However it was clear that EV and battery specialists—chemists and coders—have 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 web site. “However man, he disrespected all of the engineers so unhealthy. I discover it extremely hurtful.”

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

The interior-combustion engine, at a primary stage, converts gas and air into mechanical power, particularly torque, which is what turns the wheels. It begins with gas and air contained in the automobile’s cylinders; smaller vehicles 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 transferring.

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 power despatched to it and converts it into rotational movement, propelling the wheels. That’s the elementary-school clarification; there are myriad different elements—piston rings, flywheels, rocker arms, exhaust manifolds—that do their piece. In trendy vehicles, that entire course of is orchestrated by computer systems—small electronic-control items that assist optimize all these actions.

Alongside the chain, there’s so much that may go fallacious. There’s additionally so much 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 gas. 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 tons of of transferring elements; an electrical drivetrain has fewer than 25. An EV consists of a big battery pack, usually with tons of of rechargeable lithium-ion cells and usually tucked beneath the cabin ground, 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 present to alternating present. That energy is then fed into an electrical motor, or typically a number of motors for additional energy or to provide all-wheel drive.

The electrical motors are additionally fairly easy, they usually pull off a nifty trick that does away with the necessity for the complicated, multigear transmission utilized in ICE vehicles. In a fuel engine, most acceleration or torque is achieved solely in a slender band of working pace earlier than the engine dangers spiking over its revolutions-per-minute restrict, which might 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 steadiness between all that energy coming from the engine and the way rapidly the wheels are rotating. The engine can ship sooner speeds solely because it strikes up the gears.

In an EV, an electrical motor can primarily take an identical quantity of power as produced by a fuel or diesel engine, however use it way 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 easy, with out these minipauses that come from a conventional transmission shifting gears.
Automotive and Driver’s 2008 assessment 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 frenzy that instantaneous 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 may 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 mentioned. “It’s now not an artwork kind.”

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 obtained him observed. He caught wind of an worker vehicle-lease program that required managers to fill out a survey once they swapped vehicles. Yeung figured that will 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 mentioned. “Now we have all these engineers filling out detailed surveys in regards to the high quality and options of those vehicles. There’s obtained 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 laptop—and delivered a thick report of what he discovered to a vp.

One in every of Yeung’s favourite engine-development initiatives underscores the myriad potentialities that power-train engineers should toy with. Round 2005, Yeung regarded over Ford’s growth 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 have been deliberate. Usually you’d count on 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. However it was clear that EV and battery specialists—chemists and coders—have been the brand new rock stars.

That was bizarre, and Yeung couldn’t determine why Ford would try this. Trying again, he suspects it in all probability had so much 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 within the automobile enterprise is fueled by no matter new or enhanced automobile attributes could be touted in multimillion-dollar promoting campaigns. Automotive manufacturers need to tout extra horsepower, higher gas economic system, a smoother trip, or an even bigger touchscreen.

“Are you certain 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 have been principally ignored. So Yeung determined to freelance an engine improve in his spare time.

He recalibrated the engine—twiddling with the next 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 attainable. Yeung jury-rigged a mock-up of his idea and located it labored, however he would wish 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 easy drive.

Yeung knew he wanted a combustion professional—somebody to determine the exact air-and-fuel ratio that will ship probably the most punch as effectively as attainable. Among the finest 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 fun of gathering a ragtag crew of power-train engineers right into a nondescript convention room to hash over methods for enhancing the Fusion engine’s efficiency. “I believe I do know precisely the best way to change that cylinder head if you wish to get extra energy out of it,” he remembers saying. “And I believe we will do it with out making a giant tear-up.” Energy-train strategizing classes like that, he remembers, have been like “watching
The Huge Bang Concept—lots of like-minded guys all breaking into geek speak, and all making an attempt to resolve the identical drawback.”

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

Yeung was simply joyful he lastly obtained 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 obtained the buyout electronic mail from HR, electrical autos have been nonetheless barely noticeable on the U.S. automotive gross sales charts. At GM, Volkswagen, Ford, and different huge automobile firms, EVs accounted for lower than 2 p.c of gross sales—they usually have been cash losers. Total, simply 3 p.c of all U.S. new-car gross sales have 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 arduous pivot to electrics was in full swing and upending a century of inner order. A technology of engineers like Yeung have been feeling strain. In 2018, Ford executives
boasted that they might dole out US $11 billion over the subsequent few years to develop electrical vehicles. In 2020, GM mentioned it could make investments $20 billion in EVs, together with driverless tech. Ford a 12 months later mentioned $30 billion. GM got here again with $35 billion. Ford in early 2022 upped the ante but once more, to $50 billion.

Growing a brand new engine program can value tons of of hundreds of thousands of {dollars}, even north of $1 billion, and contain tons of of suppliers. In keeping with analysis agency S&P International Mobility, in 2011, automobile firms globally rolled out nearly 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 succeed in zero this decade, which means nearly no engines are being designed from scratch. Certain, fuel and diesel engines will likely be in showrooms for a number of many years to return. And gas-electric hybrids are
going to determine extra 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 excellent.

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

An article from the July 1900 concern of
The Vehicle Journal delved into the contradictions of electrical vehicles in a method that’s eerily modern: “In cleanliness, ease of administration and security, it has preferrred qualities,” it learn. “Its nice value, its extreme weight and the varied 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 have been simply rising, {hardware} shops bought cans of petroleum. In the meantime, electrical energy technology outdoors huge cities was scarce, and motorists with electrical vehicles had vary anxiousness.

New Engine Improvement 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 vehicles bought by dozens of upstart firms. As street programs improved, Individuals needed to journey additional, which additionally favored fuel vehicles.

Within the ensuing many years, generations of power-train engineers all over the world 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 gas 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 dimensions and structure of the engine’s cylinders, but in addition grew to become highly effective manufacturers unto themselves. Automotive 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, at the very least for bigger, costlier vehicles. In 1965, GM provided greater than 25 completely 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 may share parts and even complete engines with out automobile homeowners noticing. By the mid-Nineteen Seventies, GM had quietly begun joint engine growth amongst its manufacturers, sharing elements and in some instances utilizing primarily the identical engine in vehicles from completely 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 mild 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 huge sedan in for engine work. His mechanic ordered a number of alternative 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 in truth 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 completely different engines GM utilized in 1965 are gone. Within the mid-2020s, the corporate makes use of fewer than a dozen completely different fuel and diesel engines for all its U.S. vehicles at present.

BYD and Tesla Electrical Automobile Gross sales Stunned 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 resolve among the business’s most vexing engineering challenges.

The U.S. Clear Air Act in 1970 required automobile firms to scale back the air pollution that their tailpipes have been spewing. Catalytic converters have been added to scale back poisonous fumes. New injection programs have been developed to spray gas instantly into the engine’s combustion chamber, boosting energy and effectivity. Corporations added extra gears to transmissions to assist engines run extra optimally, additionally saving gas. Ultimately, hybrid gas-electric vehicles, popularized by the Toyota Prius, developed within the late Nineteen Nineties, deployed a small battery pack and electrical motor to considerably improve gas economic 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 response to Environmental Safety Company knowledge. The quantity of greenhouse-gas-producing carbon dioxide that U.S. autos belched out was roughly minimize 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 have been going through tightening rules globally. Carbon-emissions guidelines in Europe had gotten so strict that some automakers have been being threatened with fines of $100 million or extra in the event that they couldn’t enhance their emissions. Auto execs have been concluding that they might by no means have the ability to wring sufficient efficiencies from the internal-combustion engine to satisfy 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 packages 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 firms on the planet, with the deepest of pockets, to do it at scale. It gave the massive automobile firms large limitations to entry that allowed them to function for many years with nearly no newcomers. There primarily have been no startups of observe, 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 huge gamers all over the world like Samsung, LG, and Panasonic, that are huge canine in batteries. Electrical motors are largely the area of Asian gamers huge and small, together with Japan’s Nidec Corp. and lots of low-cost choices in China. The stuff is comparatively straightforward to place collectively right into a automobile bundle. Some automobile execs have in contrast it to snapping a Lego set collectively.

Yeung shouldn’t be satisfied the incumbent automobile firms can set up sufficient experience in EVs to remain on prime. They’re shedding their aggressive benefit, their experience. They’re shedding guys like Lem Yeung and Steve Penkevich. The built-in benefits that the incumbent carmakers wielded for greater than a century are disappearing as vehicles turn out to be much less mechanical and extra infused with complicated software program. They’re getting into a race during 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. Pondering like a automobile firm has flipped to turn out to be an obstacle.

“EV expertise shouldn’t be that troublesome. It’s simply modular,” Yeung says. “Ford can study to construct and home their batteries and their motors, however actually, the innovation stage 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 assume the auto business goes to innovate in battery expertise or electrical motors. I believe all of the limitations to entry have gone.”

Yeung had come to those conclusions lengthy earlier than that HR electronic 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.