Ford cancelled its three-row electric SUV in 2024. This week, Ford's chief EV and digital officer Doug Field started posting photos of the cancelled prototype on LinkedIn, and the company confirmed to The Drive that it is "the 3-row SUV we cancelled in 2024," now repurposed as a research vehicle to "inform our next generation of electric vehicles." It is the first public look at a project Ford wrote off almost two years ago.
The specs Ford was chasing on the project were ambitious. The seven-passenger crossover would have offered a claimed WLTP range in excess of 350 miles (563 km), with a DC fast-charging curve capable of adding 100 miles in six minutes. A range-extended variant was planned at 550 miles (885 km) on a full tank and full charge. The cancelled car would have slotted above the Mach-E and the F-150 Lightning as Ford's EV flagship family hauler.
What Ford Cancelled And Why It Came Back
The prototype looks nothing like a Ford. The body reads closer to the Honda 0 SUV (also cancelled, last month) than to anything in the Blue Oval lineup: rounded front end, rakish windscreen, long sloping roof, nearly vertical rear, minimalist door handles echoing the Mach-E. That visual distance from Ford's design language is the reason the company is comfortable showing it. Nothing Ford is shipping today references this car, which means Ford loses no competitive leverage by letting Doug Field's LinkedIn followers zoom in.
The reason Ford cancelled the project in 2024 was economics. At the time, Ford's Model e division was losing roughly 40,000 USD per EV sold. A 350-mile flagship three-row EV was not going to fix that at the price point the F-150 Lightning buyer was willing to pay. Ford instead pivoted to hybrids and to a 30,000 USD affordable pickup that Jim Farley has since made the centerpiece of the company's EV strategy. The three-row crossover was the most expensive casualty of that pivot.
The Significance Now
What is useful about this prototype is not the body, it is the electrical architecture. A 350-mile range target plus 100-miles-in-six-minutes DC fast charging points to an 800V platform with a pack in the 110 kWh range, thermal management built for sustained high-power DC sessions, and battery chemistry engineered for fast-charge cycle life. That stack is exactly what Ford's next-generation EV platform, which Farley has confirmed is in development, will need.
Ford has not committed a production date or product for the next-gen EV architecture. The 30,000 USD pickup remains first in the pipeline. The three-row EV, in any form, is at least three years out. Ford's next EV product announcement is expected at CES 2027.