Ford eShadow: lighter vans, more payload

Speaker A: Hello and welcome to The Road to Net 0a. Ah, podcast from the Advanced Propulsion Center. Today we're talking about a collaborative research and development project led by Ford that's all about losing weight. And not just because I'm recording this around Christmas party season. This is eShadow, a 8.5 million pound project, including 4.1 million pounds in government grant funding, aiming to develop a lightweight chassis design for electric commercial vehicles that significantly improves payload capacity without compromising durability or cost effectiveness. Basically, lighter van, more payload. To explain in more depth, coming up is an interview between energy and transport journalist David James and the late Professor Alan Banks. Alan was well known and highly regarded in the industry. He sadly passed away earlier this year. As uh, UK Lightweight Innovations Manager at Ford, he had a central role in this project and has given so much to the materials and composites community over many years. It's not just his expertise but his support of others, championing those around him as a selfless leader that will mean he is sorely missed. You'll hear his enthusiasm and friendly nature in the chat we recorded at, uh, Ford's R and D Centre in, in Dunton earlier in 2024.

Speaker B: One of the big challenges of electrifying commercial vehicles is balancing range against payload. The longer the range, the more batteries you need. The more batteries you have, the less payload you can carry. A team of UK companies led by Ford are tackling this issue by using the latest composite technologies to make the vehicle chassis as light as possible. If the vehicle itself is lighter, uh, there's more payload available for heavy batteries. This project, known as Eshadow, is a collaborative research and development project enabled by the Advanced Propulsion Centre. We went along to Ford's Dunton site to see their prototype Transit with its new carbon fiber composite ladder chassis, where we met with Ford's UK Lightweight Innovations Manager, Professor Alan Banks. Alan, just tell us about Project Eshadow.

Speaker C: Eshadow is the culmination of two projects that we've previously done with actually some of the partners that we're working on with Eshadow. So the project called Class, which was a carbon fibre rear suspension member for a Focus rs. And then we did the chassis project, which was the front cross member lower control arm and the rear dead beam axle for a Transit van. And, um, we learned so much from those projects that the, the culmination of those, if you like, was the Eshadow project because that took everything to the next step, took everything to production where we could save a whole lot of weight on a vehicle that really did need the weight taken out of it. And it kind of just brought everything together in a production scale so that we could bring that into learning from our forward models and we can save weight, which means efficient payload in our vehicles. And when you're on a commercial vehicle, payload is everything. Payload is king. So the more payload we can get in the vehicle, that just makes everything better. It's better for our customers, it's better for the environment, it's better for sustainability. And the fact that we can do these things at scale, at, uh, cost, means that we can really give our customers what they need.

Speaker B: Tell us about the Eshadow partners. Why was it important to have collaboration?

Speaker C: I think collaboration in the modern world is really important. I think long gone are the days when a company could really do these kind of advanced engineering projects on their own are probably long gone. We tend to specialize in, in what we know. So when you want to go to the next level generation of ideas, and don't get me wrong, we have departments who do that. I'm in one of those departments. But are, ah, we specialized? Are we specialized in carbon fiber? No, we're not. Are we specialist in carbon fiber manufacturer and glass fiber manufacturer? Not as much as we would probably like to be. So when we collaborate with these projects, it's really good because we get outside learning, we get outside experience, we can meet new people, we can help their companies progress into tier ones that they're able to then progress into the marketplace and really innovate. And that's the most important thing because without the collaboration, you kind of lose the innovation side of it, which is really important. And with the funding that we get from apc. In fact, all of the three projects that I mentioned previously have all been done with Innovate UK funding and with the APC funding that we have for this project, we were able to bring four extremely strong UK partnerships together to really forge deep and meaningful relationships that we can move forward as we develop our future vehicles.

Speaker B: Just give us a sense of the macro drivers that are pushing this level of innovation. What does it look like from inside an OEM rather than from the perspective of people like me on the outside?

Speaker C: Honestly, the environment is getting really tough out there. We are finding, uh, that we are getting a lot of competition from people that we wouldn't necessarily have seen competition from a while ago. So people like, you know, sort of, and I'm thinking of the car side now rather than commercial vehicles. But, um, we're getting people like BMW and Mercedes who are making smaller vehicles and are punching up. But then we have the likes of Kia and Hyundai who again we wouldn't necessarily have considered ourselves. The competitors are actually coming up, so we're being squeezed in the middle now. Ford Motor company has always been an innovation, um, company. If you think back to some of the vehicles that we've done in the past, so we've got the Mustang, we have all of the RS range that we've done, all world class vehicles and honestly my favorite vehicle ever, the Ford Transit, because this is everything to everybody. If you think about it, it can be a van, it can be a bus, it can be a Luton van, it can be a tipper lorry, it can be a check, it can be a cherry picker, it's so versatile and of course it's the fastest vehicle on, on in the world because it doesn't matter what car you're driving, there's always a Transit behind you, trying to get past. So and these days it's a very, very good looking vehicle as well, as you can probably see. So for us the core of what we do in, in an OEM is innovation and satisfying our customer needs. It's intrinsically important to our business model. Without our customers we're nothing. And we understand that. And from a commercial vehicle perspective we think or uh, we, we absolutely know, in fact we don't think we understand our customers probably better than anyone. So we understand that they want payload efficiency, we understand that they want a vehicle that's going to be sustainable, we understand that they want longevity, they want durability and we do whatever we can to maximise our customers wants. From an OEM perspective it's vitally important.

Speaker B: So what parameters did you put around the project when you were talking to the project partners, what were the factors that you needed to take into consideration?

Speaker C: Yeah, well from our perspective it was about getting the weight out of the vehicle. So we wanted to get 40% out of the ladder frame of the vehicle. So from the cab backwards, we wanted to get 40% of the weight out of that. I won't tell you what that is for competitive reasons obviously, but the learnings that we had from the chassis project, especially where we were able to average a 40% weight reduction in that vehicle, was just fantastic. So with this project, as you said, everything is mass producible. So we use aluminium extrusions, we use aluminium castings and um, we use three types of carbon fibre actually we use what we call smc, which is sheet moulded compound, which of which you can injection Mold and compression mould. We use woven material, which is the sexy stuff. That's the bit that looks like a Formula One car. That's the bit that you want to see because that tells you it's carbon fibre, visually. And we use unidirectional material, which doesn't look particularly outstanding when you see it on the, uh, on the vehicle. But that's the bit that does all the strength. That's the bit that's really, really strong. As the name implies, strong in one direction. So unidirectional. And the beauty of carbon fiber is you can place the material where you need it. It's what we call anisotropic, so it's only strong in one direction. Whereas steel is what we call isotropic because it's strong in every single direction. But the upside with steel is that, you know, you get a strong material, it's strong in every direction. But the downside is that it's strong in places you don't necessarily want it to be strong. It's only strong in those areas because you've used the isotropic material. With carbon fiber, uh, you can put the material where you want it and you don't waste any that you don't. So if you need material in one area, then you put more in one area. If you don't need it in another area, you can take it off. So for us, it's all about making sure that all of the processes that we have in our vehicle are mass producible, as you said, because we make about half a million transits globally, including North America. So we need to be able to, to, to, to tell our plants, if you like, that we can, like, satisfy their demand. When they're making, you know, maybe like 1500 vehicles a day, they need to be able to get the parts with the quality that they need to make sure that they can do it. And the only way to do that is to make sure that you can use mass producible techniques. So we use compression moulding for the carbon fiber all in one shot. So, you know, the things that we do, we make sure that one, the customer can afford them when, when, when we're ready to put them in, we make sure that they're durable. And of course, the whole point of it is that we can make them at scale, otherwise we fail.

Speaker B: And the outputs, how pleased are you with the results to date?

Speaker C: I think the result today, I mean, it's just amazing. I think we've met all of our targets. The vehicle weighs exactly what we thought it was going to weigh. So our Computer Aided Engineering tools that we use, our CAE tools have, uh, predicted that, uh, it would weigh weight. Again. I'm not going to tell you why for competitive reasons, but it's come up almost bang on. And, you know, we've used structural, um, adhesives to make sure that the, the parts go together and never come apart again. And I mean, when you see the vehicle driving around, this is going to sound a really stupid thing to say, but it looks like we designed it to do that. It just looks like that's how it should have been in the first place. And to actually, you know, we've gone through two and a half years of like, design work looking at it on the screen. You know, we've looked at it on the CAE and we've seen all the red areas and the green areas and we've tried to make sure that there's no red areas and get it all right, but it's not until you actually see the parts being compression moulded and extruded and then they're put all together and then you've got the whole frame and then we put it in the back of the vehicle and you look at it and you go, wow, that looks fantastic. And the, the culmination of this, I mean, this is what we work for and it's just been such a great, great experience to actually see it being built for the first time. And uh, yeah, this is, this is the fun part.

Speaker B: How important is the Advanced Propulsion Centre for projects like this? Ford is a big company with potentially a lot of money to invest. Why did you decide to do this through an APC enabled project?

Speaker C: Well, the advantage of APC is really, um, really simple to answer because we're a multinational company, as you said. So we have innovation centers in Germany, we have them in, um, the US and elsewhere around the world. So having a UK focus on innovation is really important because with APC funding it means that we can do the work in the uk. You're right, we are a multinational company. Potentially we would have done ESHADOW anyway, but it might have been done in North America, but with the APC funding that meant that we could do it all in the uk, which is just outstanding. It means that we can do all the work in the uk. All the learning is kept within these walls. Obviously we're a multinational company. We're not just keeping it within these walls, you know, anyone. The beauty of everything that we've done on the ESHADOW project Means that we can put it onto other vehicles. If we wanted to put it on a Focus, we can uh, the technology transferable on a Ranger, the technology transferable. So there's no reason why we can't then tell the whole Ford world, this is how you want to do advanced engineering, this is how you do advanced materials. But it starts here, which is the beauty of it.

Speaker B: How big a deal are these composites for next generation vehicle manufacturing? Is this the future?

Speaker C: I think it's undoubtedly the future. I think you could argue that the car, uh, business may not adopt it as quickly as the commercial vehicle business. But I think commercial vehicles is where you're going to see the biggest change. When you think about it, as I said before, commercial vehicles, it's all about payload. We need to satisfy our customer demand for payload efficiency. But in an electrified era where the vehicle is getting heavier just by the virtue of the fact that you've got a huge battery, you've got an electric motor, then you start to squeeze your payload just because the vehicle's getting heavier and we need to offset that payload otherwise our customers are going to have like reduced payload efficiency, which means they need more vehicles to carry the same amount. So I think commercial vehicles are really where we're going to see it fly first. And our next generation transit, wait and see. You never know.

Speaker B: Thank you for listening to the Road to Net Zero from the Advanced Propulsion Centre. This episode is dedicated to the memory of Professor Alan Banks who sadly died shortly after this interview was recorded. His work in lightweight innovation and inspirational leadership are a lasting legacy that will benefit not just the UK automotive sector, but also the global effort towards Net Zero transportation.

Speaker A: Thank you David. That was David James with kind words about Alan there. Thank you for listening to this episode of the podcast. Eshadow was a collaborative research and development project and our next round of funding is expected to be opening very shortly. To apply or learn more about the opportunities available to support your latest zero emission technology, please visit APCUK to CO UK.