Ford’s EV transition made combustion engineers expendable

One summer season morning in 2021,Lem Yeung opened an electronic 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 automotive firms have lengthy provided. The son of Chinese immigrants, Yeung was additionally a part of Ford power-train lineage—each of his mother and father additionally have been engineers who developed engines on the iconic firm.

This article is tailored from the creator’s new e book Inevitable: Inside the Messy, Unstoppable Transition to Electric Vehicles (Harvard Business Review Press, 2025)Harvard Business Review Press

The electronic mail was a buyout provide, coming amid one in every of Ford’s seemingly countless belt-tightening cycles. The firm was
transitioning to electrical automobiles, 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 Street analysts that the old-guard power-train engineers can be making room for EV specialists.

“ICE [internal-combustion-engine] talent and BEV [battery-electric-vehicle] digital talent are different,” Farley
stated at an investor convention in February 2022. “You can’t ask ICE people to do certain things. It takes too long.”

If Yeung agreed to retire early, the corporate would kick in a number of extra months of wage along with retirement pay. For many eligible Ford vets, it may need been a no brainer. But 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 develop into a lot much less satisfying.

Ford’s Power-Train Engineering Legacy

For most 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 heart. His first job on the automaker had been inside a Nineteen Twenties wood-paneled constructing in Dearborn, Mich.—only a few miles from the historic house 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 Power Stroke “Scorpion,” the beast utilized in Ford’s award-winning Super Duty 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 beloved 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 beloved engaged on engines due to their immense complexity, which demanded improvisation and fostered an entrepreneurial strategy 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. But engine work, Yeung defined, entails much more trial and error and nuance than one may count on. Developing and refining automotive 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 heart, the place he’d sit within the driver’s seat with a pc display screen and analyze information together with engine pace, ignition spark, and air strain. He would tweak the inputs time and again after which transfer onto the subsequent car. Later he would use a spreadsheet to provide you with averages—information that might be routed to groups engaged on new variations of the engine.

“I mean, like, f***, I don’t know how much spark. No one’s teaching me. I had to learn later, right? Pressure 10 degrees after top dead center. Where the preignition points are. All that stuff is trial and error. You learn as you go,” he stated. “I was always worried about bombing out the engine. It was scary. It was super cool.”

Ford CEO Jim Farley’s Vision for an EV Transition

Ultimately, the selections made by power-train engineers have an effect on tons of of hundreds of future automotive patrons, who will, for years, expertise the dwelling, respiration engine the engineers created. Yeung remembers being wired by the job early on, envisioning all of the methods wherein he might screw it up. “I was freaking out because when you get out of school and you’ve grown up as an engineer and among engineers, you want to be perfect, right? But you realize that’s not real 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 type. To his shock, it helped. His boss stated: “You know, someone told me this once, and I’m going to pass it on to you, because I remember always being so afraid of f-ing things up: ‘If you’re not breakin’ something, you aren’t doing nuthin!’ ” Encouraged by that pep speak, Yeung realized to like his job.

By the time that HR electronic mail hit his laptop display screen, the enjoyable occasions had light, Yeung stated. New engine applications—those that unleashed all that creativity and collaboration amongst engineers—had dried up. Even although 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 Electric Vehicle Center is the primary Ford plant to maneuver automobiles utilizing robotic autonomous guided automobiles as a substitute of conventional in-floor conveyor strains. Much of legacy automotive firms’ sources are being channeled into the event of plug-in fashions, although 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. Traditional power-train engineers, who for therefore lengthy rode a conveyor belt from Midwestern engineering faculties 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 Power Stroke Scorpion, have been producing many of the firm’s revenue. But 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 was so excited to have Jim Farley up there. I thought, ‘Oh my God, a car guy! A dude who races all the time and reads Jalopnik,’ ” Yeung recalled, referencing the favored
car-enthusiast web site. “But man, he disrespected all the engineers so bad. I find it incredibly hurtful.”

Internal-Combustion Engines: a Power-Train Engineer’s Playground

The internal-combustion engine, at a fundamental stage, converts gasoline and air into mechanical power, particularly torque, which is what turns the wheels. It begins with gasoline and air contained in the automotive’s cylinders; smaller automobiles might 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 power despatched to it and converts it into rotational movement, propelling the wheels. That’s the elementary-school rationalization; there are myriad different components—piston rings, flywheels, rocker arms, exhaust manifolds—that do their piece. In fashionable automobiles, that complete course of is orchestrated by computer systems—small electronic-control items that assist optimize all these actions.

Along the chain, there’s rather a lot that may go incorrect. There’s additionally rather a lot 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 countless innovation and problem-solving. It’s rewarding work.

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

The gasoline engines Yeung labored on have tons of of shifting components; an electrical drivetrain has fewer than 25. An EV consists of a giant battery pack, sometimes with tons of of rechargeable lithium-ion cells and usually tucked underneath the cabin flooring, sending energy to an inverter, concerning the measurement 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 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 advanced, multigear transmission utilized in ICE automobiles. In a gasoline engine, most acceleration or torque is achieved solely in a slim band of working pace 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 steadiness between all that energy coming from the engine and the way shortly the wheels are rotating. The engine can ship quicker 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 gasoline or diesel engine, however use it much more effectively, eliminating the necessity for gears. Electric 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 standard transmission shifting gears.
Car and Driver’s 2008 evaluate of Tesla’s first automotive, the Roadster, sums it up this manner: “Even more impressive is the instant acceleration at real-world speeds of 30 to 100 mph. Squeeze the throttle, and the Tesla surges forward with effortless ease.”

Yeung isn’t anti-EV. As a automotive man, he’s pushed loads of them and is aware of the push that prompt torque produces. His criticism is that, from his standpoint as an ICE specialist, EVs are, properly, 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 plenty of of his power-train friends might adapt their abilities to work on EVs. But that work would contain little of the ingenuity and creativity that he had come to like on the planet of gasoline and diesel engines.

“With an electric motor, there’s really not that much to it,” he stated. “It’s no longer an art form.”

A Clandestine Ford Escape Engine Upgrade

Yeung graduated from Purdue University 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. Eventually 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 after they swapped automobiles. Yeung figured that might be a treasure trove of knowledge that might assist car builders, however no person was doing something with the info. “To me that was crazy,” Yeung stated. “We have all these engineers filling out detailed surveys about the quality and features of these cars. There’s got to be some great 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 vice chairman.

One of Yeung’s favourite engine-development initiatives underscores the myriad potentialities that power-train engineers should toy with. Around 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 have been deliberate. Normally you’d count on some form of enhancement each few years to maintain these automobiles aggressive. But right here, for 2 of Ford’s best-selling automobiles, the engines weren’t altering.

At Ford, the internal-combustion engine was nonetheless paying the payments. But 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 work out why Ford would do this. Looking again, he suspects it most likely had rather a lot to do with the monetary place of Detroit’s automakers as Toyota and Honda continued to develop. At the time, although, all Yeung knew was that the auto business by no means sleeps; certainly the Escape’s rivals, just like the Toyota RAV4 or the Honda CR-V, can be getting engine upgrades. Marketing within the automotive enterprise is fueled by no matter new or enhanced car attributes will be touted in multimillion-dollar promoting campaigns. Car manufacturers wish to tout extra horsepower, higher gasoline economic system, a smoother trip, or a much bigger touchscreen.

“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” Yeung requested his boss of the nonexistent engine plans. “This is going into two of our cornerstone vehicles.” His inquiries have been largely 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 attainable. 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 ensure the modifications wouldn’t solely increase the engine’s horsepower, but in addition eke out a bit extra effectivity and preserve a clean drive.

Yeung knew he wanted a combustion skilled—somebody to determine the exact air-and-fuel ratio that might ship probably the most punch as effectively as attainable. One of the very best at Ford was
Steve Penkevich, an organization lifer and native of Michigan’s rural Upper 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 probability.

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 automotive was, on paper, far much less thrilling. But to not Penkevich. “That’s the sort of project where the gasoline in your blood starts 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 reinforcing the Fusion engine’s efficiency. “I think I know exactly how to change that cylinder head if you want to get more power out of it,” he remembers saying. “And I think we can do it without making a big tear-up.” Power-train strategizing classes like that, he remembers, have been like “watching
The Big Bang Theory—lots of like-minded guys all breaking into geek speak, and all making an attempt to resolve the identical downside.”

In the top, 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 at the least extra aggressive. Penkevich was so pleased with it, his spouse was nonetheless driving an Escape with that engine 12 years later.

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

Ford and GM Duel Over EV Investment

When Yeung bought the buyout electronic mail from HR, electrical automobiles have been nonetheless barely noticeable on the U.S. automotive gross sales charts. At GM, Volkswagen, Ford, and different massive automotive firms, EVs accounted for lower than 2 % of gross sales—and so they have been cash losers. Overall, simply 3 % 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 automotive firms, the onerous 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’d dole out US $11 billion over the subsequent few years to develop electrical automobiles. In 2020, GM stated it could make investments $20 billion in EVs, together with driverless tech. Ford a 12 months later stated $30 billion. GM got here again with $35 billion. Ford in early 2022 upped the ante but once more, to $50 billion.

Developing a brand new engine program can price tons of of hundreds of thousands of {dollars}, even north of $1 billion, and contain tons of of suppliers. According to analysis agency S&P Global Mobility, in 2011, automotive firms globally rolled out nearly 70 new engine households—a base engine that can be utilized as the muse 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, which means nearly no engines are being designed from scratch. Sure, gasoline and diesel engines will likely be in showrooms for a couple 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. But the expectation is that automotive 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 choice made greater than a century in the past, when electrics competed with internal-combustion automobiles and even steam-powered automobiles to develop into the ability practice of alternative for the automotive enterprise. Around 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 concern of
The Automobile Magazine delved into the contradictions of electrical automobiles in a manner that’s eerily up to date: “In cleanliness, ease of management and safety, it has ideal qualities,” it learn. “Its great cost, its excessive weight and the various shortcomings of the storage battery, together with its extremely limited radius, combine to limit its field to certain forms of urban use.”

By the early 1900s, the reliability and high quality of gasoline engines had improved with improvements like the electrical starter and ignition system, each invented by engineer Charles F. Kettering, who turned the longtime head of analysis at GM. And although gasoline stations have been simply rising, {hardware} shops bought cans of petroleum. Meanwhile, electricity technology exterior massive cities was scarce, and motorists with electrical automobiles had vary anxiousness.

New Engine Development Dwindles

Gasoline engines gained out. Henry Ford’s assembly-line improvements dramatically drove down the price of car meeting. That made his mass-produced gas-engine Model Ts far cheaper than the electrical automobiles bought by dozens of upstart firms. As street methods improved, Americans wished to journey additional, which additionally favored gasoline automobiles.

In the following many years, generations of power-train engineers all over the world toiled to refine the machine that powered world 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 measurement, form, and even how an engine was cooled—air or water—turned grist for legendary debates amongst automotive fanatics. 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 turned highly effective manufacturers unto themselves. Car firms constructed complete advertising campaigns round their engines, with names just like the Cadillac Northstar and the Dodge Hemi.

The energy practice was as soon as so central to a automotive model’s identification that, for many years, GM operated separate engine-development divisions for many of its manufacturers. The thought was that, if the engine was the guts of the car, then every model ought to have its personal bespoke motors, at the least for bigger, costlier automobiles. In 1965, GM provided greater than 25 totally different gasoline engines throughout its Chevrolet, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, and Buick manufacturers, almost all developed, examined, and manufactured individually from each other.

Eventually, 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 parts and even complete engines with out car house owners noticing. By the mid-Nineteen Seventies, GM had quietly begun joint engine improvement amongst its manufacturers, sharing components and in some instances utilizing primarily the identical engine in automobiles from totally different marques. That saved cash, however again then, the notion of the engine being central to the automotive’s identification was so ingrained in customers’ 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 automotive’s V-8 engine with a down-market Chevy engine of the identical measurement—an early signal of engine consolidation within the auto business. Prior 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 a couple of alternative components, however after they got here in, he found that a few of them didn’t match. Eventually it was decided that the 350-cubic-inch-displacement V-8 engine in his Oldsmobile was in reality a down-market Chevy engine of the identical measurement. GM was sued for false promoting, triggering nationwide information protection of GM’s “engine scandal” and a multiyear authorized headache. Eventually, a federal jury awarded some Oldsmobile house owners $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. In the mid-2020s, the corporate makes use of fewer than a dozen totally different gasoline and diesel engines for all its U.S. automobiles right now.

BYD and Tesla Electric Vehicle Sales Surprised Incumbents

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

The U.S. Clean Air Act in 1970 required automotive firms to cut back the air pollution that their tailpipes have been spewing. Catalytic converters have been added to cut back poisonous fumes. New injection methods have been developed to spray gasoline straight into the engine’s combustion chamber, boosting energy and effectivity. Companies added extra gears to transmissions to assist engines run extra optimally, additionally saving gasoline. Eventually, 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 economic system.

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

By the late 2010s, automotive 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’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 gasoline and diesel energy trains was the key sauce of the auto business for a century. It was so advanced, 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 automotive firms enormous boundaries to entry that allowed them to function for many years with nearly no newcomers. There primarily have been no startups of be aware, till Tesla, 100 years into the automotive enterprise, when it began promoting refined electrical sedans with head-turning designs direct to customers.

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

Yeung is just not satisfied the incumbent automotive 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 develop into much less mechanical and extra infused with advanced software program. They are coming into a race wherein they’re ranging from behind, with firms that undergo none of their legacy drag. Tesla and China’s ascendant BYD—and a slew of different Chinese EV upstarts—are outmaneuvering the GMs and Volkswagens on lower-cost battery setups and consumer-friendly tech options. Thinking like a automotive firm has flipped to develop into a drawback.

“EV technology is not that difficult. It’s just modular,” Yeung says. “Ford can learn to build and house their batteries and their motors, but honestly, the innovation level on a motor and the ability to do it uniquely versus an engine? They won’t be able to do it cheaply enough. I don’t think the auto industry is going to innovate in battery technology or electric motors. I think all the barriers 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.