Ford has produced more than 5,000 large aluminum unicastings for its Fathom electric pickup as it refines the manufacturing process for the $28,350 truck ahead of its launch next year, the company said on Wednesday.
The castings are made at Ford’s Shelbyville Technical Center and are being used for process testing and to build Fathom prototypes at its Louisville Assembly Plant in Kentucky, Vladimir Bogachuk, Ford’s Chief Engineer of Advanced Vehicle Structure Architecture, wrote in a blog post.
Each Fathom will use two large castings, one for the front structure and one for the rear, replacing 146 structural parts. The castings cut weight and improve energy efficiency, Ford said.
“The team is obsessively reducing cycle time of the unicastings for efficiency,” Bogachuk wrote. Ford did not disclose the cycle time, the casting machines’ supplier or tonnage, or Shelbyville’s production capacity.
“For our new affordable midsize electric truck, the Ford Fathom, we aren’t stripping out features customers want. We’re innovating,” Chief Executive Officer Jim Farley wrote on X on Wednesday, sharing the update.
From ingots to X-rays
The process starts with aluminum ingots melted at about 1,300 degrees Fahrenheit. The molten metal moves to a holding furnace and is then injected into a two-part mold for the front or rear structure, according to Ford.
A robot removes each casting and places it in a quench tank to cool before excess material is trimmed and an operator inspects it visually.
Parts from each batch are then machined and checked in a climate-controlled room by a coordinate measuring machine, which verifies dimensions, hole locations and alignment. An industrial X-ray system looks inside the casting for pores and voids, and an optical scanner maps its surface.
Samples are also tensile-tested for strength in a materials lab, and the alloy’s chemical composition is checked. Batches stay on hold until all tests are complete and the castings are approved for shipment to Louisville.
Ford said the castings were engineered for “modular repairability,” without giving details. Large single-piece castings have raised questions across the industry about repair costs after crashes.
Building the truck in three branches
The castings are central to the Universal EV Production System that Ford is installing at Louisville, which splits a traditional assembly line into three branches.
One branch builds the front of the vehicle, another the rear, and the third installs seats, consoles and carpeting on top of the structural battery pack, which forms the floor, Ford said in an August update. The three sections are joined only after most components are installed.
Because each casting is structurally complete, it does not need to be welded into a full body shell before work can begin inside, the company said.
When it unveiled the platform in August 2025, Ford said the system used 20% fewer parts than a typical vehicle, 25% fewer fasteners and 40% fewer workstations, with assembly 15% faster. Ford said a small skunkworks team in California led the development.
“We took inspiration from the Model T – the universal car that changed the world,” Doug Field, Ford’s Chief EV, Digital and Design Officer, said at the time.
A gutted plant
Ford is spending about $5 billion on the program, nearly $2 billion of it to retool Louisville and about $3 billion at BlueOval Battery Park Michigan, which will make lithium iron phosphate prismatic cells. The investment will create about 4,000 jobs, Ford said.
Louisville went silent in late 2025 for the overhaul, and by February only the empty shell of the plant remained, according to Ford. Crews removed nearly 25,000 tons of scrap metal and installed 17,000 feet of conveyor in final assembly.
Ford plans to begin building prototypes with production-qualified parts in the first quarter of 2027, with customer vehicles later in the year.
Fathom Spotted
Ford has shown the truck only under camouflage. Farley posted photos and video of two prototypes on September 1, saying the team “was out in the desert doing hot weather testing” and “took a detour through Las Vegas to share the new name.”
The camouflage wrap carried a QR code linking to Ford’s teaser site and door stickers reading “preorder early 2027” and “camo off in 2027,” Jalopnik reported.
The images showed a low, four-door truck with a short hood, a steeply raked windshield, low-mounted headlights, aerodynamic wheels and a relatively short bed, closer in proportion to Ford’s Maverick than to a traditional midsize pickup, according to Edmunds.
On October 15, Emily Gabler, who works in technology communications at Ford, posted a photo of a Fathom “spotted on campus today in Dearborn,” which Farley reposted.
Photos of a prototype’s cabin shared by a Reddit user appear to show a conventional, landscape-oriented center screen, Ford Authority reported on October 23. Ford has confirmed only “a large, high-resolution touch screen.”
A Ford team member on the Fathom’s Reddit community dismissed an AI-generated rendering of the uncovered truck with a single word, “Nope,” Ford Authority reported in September.
The $28,350 bet
Ford named the truck the Fathom on August 6 and set a starting price of $28,350 for the standard-range version, or $29,945 including destination. The full reveal and pre-orders will come in early 2027, with deliveries in the fall.
The five-seat truck, the first model on Ford’s Universal EV Platform, will have more interior space than a Toyota RAV4, a front trunk and bidirectional charging to power a home. Ford has not disclosed its range or battery sizes.
Ford says the Fathom will accelerate about as quickly as a Mustang with the EcoBoost engine, and that its five-year ownership costs will be lower than those of a three-year-old used Tesla Model Y. Its wiring harness is more than 4,000 feet shorter and about 22 pounds lighter than that of Ford’s first-generation electric SUV, the company said.
The truck will provide a projected 10 kilowatts of AC power to a home without a separate wall-mounted inverter, Ford said in an article on Tuesday. Ford expects its Home Power Station to cost about half as much as its first-generation bidirectional charger.
It will come with built-in Apple Maps, Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, a digital key and BlueCruise hands-free driving capability, TechCrunch reported. Ford expects Level 3 “eyes-off” driving on the platform to be road-ready in 2028.
The Fathom is Ford’s main bet for returning its loss-making Model e electric vehicle unit to profit by 2029.
Chief Executive Officer Jim Farley warned last month that the launch would be difficult. “It’s going to be a heck of an effort to launch this at scale, at cost, on time,” he said at the Automotive News Congress in Detroit on September 29. “We haven’t landed the plane on mass production of UEV yet.”
Ford has also delayed the platform’s launch in Europe.
