The first vehicle to be built on Ford’s secretly developed low-cost electric vehicle platform will be a mid-size pickup truck scheduled to launch in 2027, the automaker announced Wednesday morning.

The news is part of a much larger overhaul of Ford’s electrification plans. The company is abandoning a plan to build an all-electric SUV with three rows of seats, opting instead to equip those upcoming vehicles with hybrid powertrains. A next-generation full-size electric pickup truck – the successor to the F-150 Lightning, codenamed “T3” – is now slated to launch in 2027, rather than 2025. Those changes could cost Ford as much as $1.9 billion, the company said Wednesday.

Ford isn’t the only company trying to lower the entry-level prices of its electric cars, but the decision to build a pickup truck on its low-cost electric car platform gives Ford a chance to differentiate itself from market leader Tesla, which is more focused on developing Elon Musk’s long-promised “robotaxi” as well as stripped-down versions of its Model Y SUV and Model 3 sedan.

CEO Jim Farley first revealed the existence of the “Skunkworks” team building the low-cost platform in February. It is led by former Tesla executive Alan Clarke and is headquartered in Irvine, California. The project received a talent boost in late 2023 when Ford acquired EV charging startup Auto Motive Power. But the automaker has since supplemented the roughly 300-person team with dozens of employees from Rivian, Tesla and even around 10 from Apple’s recently disbanded electric/autonomous vehicle team, as TechCrunch first reported in June.

This story develops…