Ford’s $30,000 Electric Pickup Aims to Win Over Skeptical Buyers

Everything about Ford Motor Co.’s Long Beach, California, “skunkworks” operation was designed so that its crack engineering team could dream up a new electric vehicle lineup that broke with convention. And yet after years of tinkering, the automaker is aiming to reinvent a form it didn’t get right the first time: the pickup truck.

Inside a soaring warren of buildings that’s thousands of miles away from Ford’s Dearborn, Michigan, home, designers and engineers are working on simplifying and speeding up development of what the company says will be a sleek, lightweight plug-in pickup truck that will start ...