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Ford’s electric moonshot, the mid-size pickup truck that would get it back into the EV race, finally has a name: Fathom.
The Detroit giant announced the name of its long-anticipated, highly mysterious vehicle on Thursday, alongside its price and some of its specs. The Ford Fathom will cost $28,350, not including delivery and destination fees that take its price right up to the 30-grand mark — $29,945, to be precise. Ford says it will start taking reservations early next year and deliver the first pickups later in 2027.
We don’t yet know the battery range or, crucially, what it’ll look like, as Ford is holding back the visual reveal. What we can say is that, as a mid-size pickup, the Fathom should be around the size of the gas-powered Ford Maverick, which has a near-identical starting price. Without getting into dimensions, Ford promises it will have more passenger volume than Toyota’s ubiquitous RAV4 SUV, with a frunk and a truck bed to boot.
Ford says every Fathom will be BlueCruise-capable, referencing the company’s hand-free driving assistant for highway travel. Fathom will also feature bi-directional power capability, enabling the battery to double as home energy storage, as well as embedded Apple Maps on its large touchscreen. Importantly, it will retain compatibility with Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, which has become a dealbreak for many drivers.
Fathom will be the first EV produced on Ford’s Universal EV Platform, the technology setup that has been under development at the company’s skunkworks operation in Long Beach, California. I visited there this spring to see the team that was, far from the glare of the suits in Detroit, trying to reinvent the company’s EV manufacturing strategies so it could make better and more affordable electric cars. Even then, though, I couldn’t get a look at the Fathom — or any other car designs that may or may not be under way there, as they were all still under wraps.
The skunkworks project is all about process. Ford was losing billions on its previous generation of EVs, led by the Ford F-150 Lightning and Mustang Mach-E, despite the relatively high sticker price of those cars. Engineers tried to mimic some of the stripped-down, iterative strategies of smaller firms and startups — such as stripping miles of wiring out of the vehicles — to work faster and simplify manufacturing, thereby cutting costs.
That work has allowed Ford to start the Fathom at effectively $30,000, placing it smack within the range of America’s most affordable electric vehicles. Its most obvious competitor would be the Slate EV truck, which has just begun to take reservations. Slate starts at about $25,000, but that price gets you a bare-bones pickup with roll-up windows and a plain gray exterior. Add enough a la carte features to make the truck technologically competitive with something like the Fathom and it, too, would cost around $30,000.
At the price, the Ford Fathom is also directly competitive with entry-level EVs like the new Chevy Bolt and Nissan Leaf. But as a mid-sized truck, Fathom would be more spacious and practical than a vehicle like a Bolt, while coming in well below the $35,000 starting cost of a bigger crossover like the Chevy Equinox EV.
Ford, in its announcement, ruminated on the meanings behind the “Fathom” moniker. The company wanted its crucial new EV to have a name, not an alphanumeric code like the Ford F-150. Fathom was chosen because of its twin meanings: the classical unit of measure for water depth, and the verb meaning to deeply and fully understand something.
The implication is that the Fathom EV is meant to comprehend the customer and what they want out of an electric truck. How Ford’s pickup measures up to their aspirations depends greatly on details about this vehicle that are not yet known. But just putting out a battery-powered pickup truck for under $30,000 is a great start.
