MW EVs put Ford and other automakers at a crossroads: Who will innovate the assembly line of the future?

By Claudia Assis

There's a race to build more vehicles more efficiently, with Ford, Tesla and others trying to revamp the way cars are made

Henry Ford sparked an industrial revolution with the automobile assembly line, but electric vehicles are spurring changes to make car manufacturing faster and cheaper.

Ford Motor Co., which famously popularized the assembly line, has joined Tesla Inc. and other EV makers around the world in a race to find a different, cheaper way to make a lot of cars, and fast.

The stakes are high: The shift in manufacturing comes as more Americans struggle to keep up with rising car prices, both new and used. Carmakers are looking to assemble future cars in a modular fashion rather than linear. That would mean separate components are done at the same time and later joined together in the line. The company that cracks the code of making cars, particularly EVs, in a more efficient and less costly manner will gain a significant market advantage.

New cars have shot up in price in recent years, with their average price hovering just under $50,000, as cheaper compact cars have all but disappeared from dealerships. Used cars priced at around $30,000 are a bargain of sorts, and the average auto-loan rate in July was about 10%.

Carmakers have, for now, kept the Trump administration's tariffs on materials and parts from pushing new-car prices even higher, using existing inventories and absorbing some of the costs, which have cut billions of dollars from their profits. The companies hope that an assembly line of the future will help them rein in expenses.

For EVs, there's the added affordability hurdle of soon-to-disappear tax credits in the U.S., and the ever-present threat of cheaper EVs from China flooding other markets that U.S. carmakers rely on.

Ford $(F)$, whose founder Henry Ford perfected the moving assembly line as we know it, billed its plan to launch a $30,000 midsize electric pickup truck built a new way in a couple of years as its "next Model T moment." The Model T was one of the first cars mass-produced by assembly lines in the early 1900s.

The new EV will be built on a new universal EV platform, which Ford says is expected to reduce the number of parts by 20% and assembly time by 15%, also reducing strain for its workers. Gone will be the days of putting in seats through doors, Ford executives said.

At Tesla $(TSLA)$, "unboxed" manufacturing would underpin the making of future models, including purpose-built robotaxis. Tesla has been promising EVs costing about $30,000 for years, and Chief Executive Elon Musk recently said that at least one such model could be a stripped-down Model X.

A new way to build for new types of cars

It's no coincidence that a modified assembly line would be used to make new types of vehicles. A new product can be built differently, whereas it would be a lot harder to change the way that a current product is built, said Sam Fiorani, vice president of global vehicle forecasting at AutoForecast Solutions LLC.

Some of it is already happening with existing vehicles, where their bigger components are put together separately. In module building, "you can have more people working on one vehicle at the same time," Fiorani said.

It's also no coincidence that EVs are leading the change - EVs don't have physical connections to the engine through the transmission and through the drive axle. They also don't need pipes for exhaust and fuel. Instead, they have a battery that can be plugged in to motors.

All of that means an EV is easier to make, with fewer parts and fewer physical connections, said Dawn Tilbury, a professor of robotics and mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan.

Think of the way you might build an Ikea bookcase, versus plugging in your computer to a monitor or to a mouse, Tilbury said: Electrical connections are pretty easy, and they are standard.

And if things are more streamlined, people can work faster. That makes EVs a good candidate for a different type of manufacturing system.

Even before the move toward modular production, the assembly line was already changing, with the introduction of robotics and some AI. Their promise, in an assembly line of the future, is to enable companies to make every single personalized car at the same speed and of the same quality, Tilbury said.

But for now, even introducing personalized car colors, for example, is still a thing of the future.

"The dream is what's called mass personalization, not mass production," she said. "The assembly line, as we think of it, is always changing ... It's great to see all those advances in the manufacturing."

Living in Henry Ford's world

Not all the expertise from a combustion-engine assembly line will be transferable, said Ala Qattawi, a professor of automotive engineering at the University of Toledo.

Modules, like Lego blocks, save time and design, Qattawi said. A current assembly line is already highly automated, and the future will likely rely more on a partnership between AI and human engineers.

But in its current iteration, "AI is not something we can fully trust yet," Qattawi said. "We still need human expertise."

Henry Ford had plenty of expertise, and was inspired by the assembly lines of his time: the manufacturing of guns, for example, and, growing up in rural Michigan, seeing how slaughterhouses would process an animal.

Ford was a mechanical genius who deeply understood engines and could walk onto a factory floor and know by the noise that the machines were making if things were going right, said Rice University history professor Douglas Brinkley.

Ford believed that time equaled money, and his Highland Park, Mich., factory, the first to make cars in a moving assembly line, is considered a revolution in manufacturing, which had a "profound" effect on U.S. history, Brinkley said.

"There would be no winning of World War II without America having the edge in assembly-line manufacturing," he said. People came from all over the world to see Ford's assembly line, with its massive steel beams, spinning wheels and its stationary workers.

"What's unique about Ford is that when he did it, he did it so big, and he was able to put the world on wheels," Brinkley said. Up until the late 20th century and the tech revolution, "we were in living in Henry Ford's world."

That legacy may have faded a bit, but whichever company or individuals can perfect an assembly line of the future could spark a new manufacturing revolution.

-Claudia Assis

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August 20, 2025 06:00 ET (10:00 GMT)

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