During its recent quarterly earnings call, one Ford executive revealed that it has already begun rolling Fathoms off the line at its recently revamped factory in Louisville well ahead of the affordable electric pickup's late-2027 delivery schedule.

"It's progressing very well," said Ford COO, Kumar Galhotra, during the company's recent quarterly earnings call. "90% of the validation testing has been completed. We've built our first production line vehicles at Louisville assembly plant."

Importantly, Galhotra didn't say these are production vehicles. Rather, these are the first Fathoms built on their real production line. Essentially, these validation vehicles are the beginning of Ford proving out its production process for both the Fathom and its Universal Electric Vehicle Platform. It's an important milestone for Ford, which has bet its electric future on the UEV platform and a radically different method of manufacturing cars than it's used before.

Ford will build the Fathom using a so-called "assembly tree" rather than the assembly line Henry Ford pioneered a century ago. The front, middle, and rear sections of the pickup will be put together simultaneously, then joined together toward the end of the process. Ford says this should allow it to build vehicles quicker and more efficiently, in part by making the ergonomics better for its workers. It resembles the "unboxed" process Tesla has introduced for the Cybercab.

Ford has been building cars for more than a century, but a new EV on a new platform using new manufacturing techniques needs to be fleshed out—especially if Ford wants to quickly hit the production volumes it's reportedly targeting: 100,000 sales in the first year .

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