Much storm has been brewing lately in the electric vehicle sector, and Ford grabbed the opportunity to extend its secretive low-cost EV team.

A TechCrunch review of LinkedIn data found that Ford has built this team up to around 300 employees over the last year. That includes around 50 coming from Rivian, more than 20 from Tesla, and a dozen from cash-strapped Canoo. It also hired around 10 employees from Lucid Motors, and a handful from Apple's recently disbanded EV team known as Project Titan.

It also hired two senior aerodynamicists who were working on the project at Formula 1 teams. The stealthy expansion of its team, says Bloomberg, is part of a bet by Ford, like its rivals, to dramatically cut the cost of EVs as a way to catch up with Tesla and fend off cheap competition brewing in China. "All of our EVs teams are ruthlessly focused on cost and efficiency in our EV products, because the ultimate competition is going to be the affordable Tesla and the Chinese OEMs," CEO Jim Farley said in February when he unveiled the project on an analyst call.

The new hires join a team that Ford already had strengthened with its late-2023 acquisition of a startup called Auto Motive Power, or AMP. That roster of more than 100 people was meant to come on board at Ford to accelerate work on a low-cost electric vehicle platform meant to power next-generation vehicles that could compete with Tesla at a mass-market level.

Ford was growing the team even before the acquisition. The main engineering facility is in Irvine, California - the same city where Rivian claims to be based. Within the last six months of 2023 Ford brought aboard around a dozen former employees of Rivian, most of whom are engineers. It also brought in Canoo's former director of software operations and a senior fabricator. Canoo has a large office facility in Torrance, California, just a little over five miles away.

In January, hiring picked up steam, with Ford hiring a senior mechanical design engineer who had worked on Tesla's "gigacasting" team. That effort seeks to make the underbody of a vehicle in just a few large pieces rather than weld or rivet together many more, in an effort to simplify the process.

Rivian's February layoff of 10% of its workforce also seemed to afford Ford an opportunity to snap up talent; indeed, the Advanced EV team hired another dozen engineers in the following months. In May, Ford also hired Canoo's former VP of engineering.

More recently, Ford has increased the team's presence in Palo Alto. It hired electrical engineers and program managers from AV operator Nuro —which restructured in 2023—the upstart Lucid Motors—cutting 1,300 jobs last year—and eVTOL startup Joby. And in May and June 2024, it also added multiple Project Titan engineers to the Palo Alto office.

Virtually none of the new additions Ford has brought to the project in the last year or so of its lifetime are new to the world of electric cars. Most of those who were tend to come from such eVTOL startups as Joby, Archer, and Supernal.

The company wouldn't comment on specific questions about how it's building out the team, known internally as Ford Advanced EV. It would also say that not all of the work being done by Ford Advanced EV is necessarily only for the low-cost EV project, but rather could be applied efforts across the company.

The Ford Advanced EV team is part of a global effort to build focused technology and product development teams local to the best talent centers. This team is leading the development of breakthrough EV products and technologies," Doug Field, Ford's chief EV, digital and design officer, said in a statement to TechCrunch.