Despite an industry-wide push to expand the electric vehicle segment, affordability remains one of the biggest barriers to widespread EV adoption. As such, automakers are investigating a variety of different strategies to cut costs, with GM rival Ford Motor Company even announcing the creation of a new skunkworks team to develop an affordable EV platform. General Motors, however, remains confident in its ability to offer an affordable EV without the creation of a new skunkworks division specifically geared for the task.
During the recent GM Investor Day event, company president Mark Reuss briefly discussed the upcoming next-generation 2026 Chevy Bolt EV. During his presentation, Reuss took a quick jab at Ford, stating, “we don’t need to create a skunkworks to create affordable electric vehicles. We know how to do this.”
As GM Authority covered in February, citing our sister publication, Ford Authority, Ford CEO Jim Farley has claimed that the Blue Oval brand has a new skunkworks team tasked with developing a more affordable EV platform that appears to be unrelated to any of Ford’s existing all-electric platforms. According to Farley, the small team includes “some of the best EV engineers in the world,” and operates “separate from the Ford mothership.” The team is led by former Tesla engineering director Alan Clarke, and was operating in secrecy for years before it was officially announced.
“It was a start-up. And they’ve developed a flexible platform that will not only deploy to several types of vehicles, but will be a large installed base for software and services that we’re now seeing at [Ford’s commercial products division] Pro.”
Among the products set to ride on the new low-cost platform is a crossover priced around $25,000, set to launch late in 2026. Interestingly, Farley indicated over the summer that the EV skunkworks team was “required for fitness, for cost, to use a completely different supply chain, to totally change the design standards of our EV components, to go vertically integrated and make the sourcing decisions to a lower part of the supply chain.”
Comments
Since almost everything they’ve told us about EVs has turned out to be BS, I’m not going to count on any vehicle to be $25k in late 2026. Especially with Boomer Janet Yellen printing $1 TRILLION every 100 days.
I bet the new Bolt will be like $35k and they’ll just call that affordable.
The “biggest barrier” is the fact that EV’s are total nonsense.