One summer morning in 2021, Lem Yeung opened an email from Ford’s HR department. He stared at his screen. Yeung, a mechanical engineer, had worked on internal-combustion-engine development at Ford for 30 years, the exact tenure that made him eligible for the generous retirement package that Detroit’s car companies have long offered. The son of Chinese immigrants, Yeung was also part of Ford power-train lineage—both of his parents also were engineers who developed engines at the iconic company.
This article is adapted from the author’s new book Inevitable: Inside the Messy, Unstoppable Transition to Electric Vehicles (Harvard Business Review Press, 2025)Harvard Business Review Press
The email was a buyout offer, coming amid one of Ford’s seemingly endless belt-tightening cycles. The company was transitioning to electric vehicles, but it trailed GM in profitability, and Ford’s chief executive, Jim Farley, was trying to clamp down on costs. Since being named the CEO in August 2020, Farley had been dropping hints to investors and Wall Street analysts that the old-guard power-train engineers would be making room for EV specialists.
“ICE [internal-combustion-engine] talent and BEV [battery-electric-vehicle] digital talent are different,” Farley said at an investor conference in February 2022. “You can’t ask ICE people to do certain things. It takes too long.”
If Yeung agreed to retire early, the company would kick in several more months of salary in addition to retirement pay. For many eligible Ford vets, it might have been a no-brainer. But Yeung was only 52. If he accepted, what would he do for the final decade of his career?
Then again, Yeung’s job in the preceding few years had become much less satisfying.
Ford’s Power-Train Engineering Legacy
For most of his career, the world of engine development at Ford was so big and bustling, Yeung felt like he worked inside the company’s nerve center. His first job at the automaker had been inside a 1920s wood-paneled building in Dearborn, Mich.—just a few miles from the historic home of founder Henry Ford—where hundreds of power-train engineers toiled away on generations of Ford engines.
He later managed the design and launch of a menacingly named V-8 diesel engine: the 6.7-liter Power Stroke “Scorpion,” the beast used in Ford’s award-winning Super Duty pickup. He was involved in many projects spanning the engine spectrum, from a tiny four-banger used in China to the Vulcan 3.0-liter V-6 engine for ’90s-era Ranger pickups.
Ford power-train engineer Lem Yeung loved working on engines because of their immense complexity. Lem Yeung
With short-cropped dark hair and an athletic build, Yeung is a bit of an iconoclast, not afraid to spout his opinions or question a supervisor. He tends to sprinkle his conversations with f-bombs. He loved working on engines because of their immense complexity, which demanded improvisation and fostered an entrepreneurial approach to solving problems. He’s seen it hundreds of times: eager young engineering grads showing up at Ford, ready to apply their math and computer calculations to their tasks. But engine work, Yeung explained, involves far more trial and error and nuance than one might expect. Developing and refining car engines always presents gray areas, judgment calls, and a surprising amount of going with your gut.
Early in his career, Yeung would arrive each morning at a calibration-testing center, where he’d sit in the driver’s seat with a computer screen and analyze data including engine speed, ignition spark, and air pressure. He would tweak the inputs over and over and then move onto the next vehicle. Later he would use a spreadsheet to come up with averages—data that would be routed to teams working on new versions of the engine.
“I mean, like, f***, I don’t know how much spark. No one’s teaching me. I had to learn later, right? Pressure 10 degrees after top dead center. Where the preignition points are. All that stuff is trial and error. You learn as you go,” he said. “I was always worried about bombing out the engine. It was scary. It was super cool.”
Ford CEO Jim Farley’s Vision for an EV Transition
Ultimately, the decisions made by power-train engineers affect hundreds of thousands of future car buyers, who will, for years, experience the living, breathing engine the engineers created. Yeung remembers being stressed out by the job early on, envisioning all the ways in which he could screw it up. “I was freaking out because when you get out of school and you’ve grown up as an engineer and among engineers, you want to be perfect, right? But you realize that’s not real engineering.”
He was so anxious that, against his better judgment, he confided in his boss, an old-school, Harley-Davidson rider with a sink-or-swim management style. To his surprise, it helped. His boss said: “You know, someone told me this once, and I’m going to pass it on to you, because I remember always being so afraid of f-ing things up: ‘If you’re not breakin’ something, you aren’t doing nuthin!’ ” Encouraged by that pep talk, Yeung learned to love his job.
By the time that HR email hit his computer screen, the fun times had faded, Yeung said. New engine programs—the ones that unleashed all that creativity and collaboration among engineers—had dried up. Even though EVs at the time accounted for a tiny sliver of Ford’s business, most of the money, resources, and energy was being channeled into developing plug-in models.
Ford’s Rouge Electric Vehicle Center is the first Ford plant to move vehicles using robotic autonomous guided vehicles instead of traditional in-floor conveyor lines. Much of legacy car companies’ resources are being channeled into the development of plug-in models, even though EVs still account for a fraction of vehicle sales.Ford
Farley, a rookie CEO, was making bold proclamations about Ford’s EV ambitions in an effort to erase the perception that the company had fallen behind. He was hiring engineers from Silicon Valley, from places like Apple and Google—and yes, from Tesla. Traditional power-train engineers, who for so long rode a conveyor belt from Midwestern engineering schools like Michigan State and Purdue straight into Ford, were being bought out, let go, or marginalized. At Ford, the internal-combustion engine was still paying the bills—F-150 pickup trucks, many with growling V-8 engines like Yeung’s Power Stroke Scorpion, were generating most of the company’s profit. But it was clear that EV and battery specialists—chemists and coders—were the new rock stars.
Yeung initially thought he had an ally in the new CEO. “I was so excited to have Jim Farley up there. I thought, ‘Oh my God, a car guy! A dude who races all the time and reads Jalopnik,’ ” Yeung recalled, referencing the popular car-enthusiast website. “But man, he disrespected all the engineers so bad. I find it incredibly hurtful.”
Internal-Combustion Engines: a Power-Train Engineer’s Playground
The internal-combustion engine, at a basic level, converts fuel and air into mechanical energy, specifically torque, which is what turns the wheels. It starts with fuel and air inside the car’s cylinders; smaller cars may have four cylinders; larger or sportier ones might have six or eight. Inside a cylinder, a spark ignites the air-and-fuel mixture, thrusting down a piston inside the cylinder to get things moving.
That symphony of exquisitely timed mini explosions inside the cylinders sets the wheels in motion, but only after an intricate chain reaction of mechanical movements. The pistons thrusting up and down are attached to connecting rods, which attach to a crankshaft. The crankshaft, in turn, uses the energy sent to it and converts it into rotational motion, propelling the wheels. That’s the elementary-school explanation; there are myriad other parts—piston rings, flywheels, rocker arms, exhaust manifolds—that do their piece. In modern cars, that whole process is orchestrated by computers—small electronic-control units that help optimize all those movements.
Along the chain, there’s a lot that can go wrong. There’s also a lot that can be tweaked—incrementally, methodically—to make it better, to eke out just a bit more power, to make things run a bit more smoothly or use a bit less fuel. That’s a big part of the appeal for power-train engineers like Yeung: the intricacies of the internal-combustion engine allowed for almost endless innovation and problem-solving. It’s rewarding work.
Lem Yeung helped design the second and third generations of the 6.7-liter Power Stroke “Scorpion” engine used in Ford’s Super Duty trucks. Ford
The gasoline engines Yeung worked on have hundreds of moving parts; an electric drivetrain has fewer than 25. An EV consists of a large battery pack, typically with hundreds of rechargeable lithium-ion cells and normally tucked under the cabin floor, sending power to an inverter, about the size of a small suitcase. The inverter changes the electricity from the battery from direct current to alternating current. That power is then fed into an electric motor, or sometimes multiple motors for extra power or to produce all-wheel drive.
The electric motors are also pretty simple, and they pull off a nifty trick that does away with the need for the complex, multigear transmission used in ICE cars. In a gas engine, maximum acceleration or torque is achieved only in a narrow band of operating speed before the engine risks spiking over its revolutions-per-minute limit, which can cause it to fail. That’s where a transmission comes in: Handing off that torque from first gear to second, or second to third, and so on, keeps an optimal balance between all that power coming from the engine and how quickly the wheels are rotating. The engine can deliver faster speeds only as it moves up the gears.
In an EV, an electric motor can essentially take a similar amount of energy as produced by a gas or diesel engine, but use it far more efficiently, eliminating the need for gears. Electric motors deliver maximum torque across all speeds. That’s why most people find EVs so fun to drive: That power thrust is there the instant the foot hits the pedal. The acceleration is smooth, without those minipauses that come from a traditional transmission shifting gears. Car and Driver’s 2008 review of Tesla’s first car, the Roadster, sums it up this way: “Even more impressive is the instant acceleration at real-world speeds of 30 to 100 mph. Squeeze the throttle, and the Tesla surges forward with effortless ease.”
Yeung isn’t anti-EV. As a car guy, he’s driven plenty of them and knows the rush that instant torque produces. His complaint is that, from his standpoint as an ICE specialist, EVs are, well, boring. They don’t require any of that futzing around with air-to-fuel ratios, spark timing, and valve-train tweaking that Yeung and countless other auto engineers have tinkered on for more than a century. Yeung says he and many of his power-train peers could adapt their skills to work on EVs. But that work would involve little of the ingenuity and creativity that he had come to love in the world of gas and diesel engines.
“With an electric motor, there’s really not that much to it,” he said. “It’s no longer an art form.”
A Clandestine Ford Escape Engine Upgrade
Yeung graduated from Purdue University in 1991, in the teeth of a recession. He applied for several positions at power companies and was turned down by all of them. Eventually he landed an internship at Ford, and his work ethic and creativity got him noticed. He caught wind of an employee vehicle-lease program that required managers to fill out a survey when they swapped cars. Yeung figured that would be a treasure trove of information that could help vehicle developers, but nobody was doing anything with the data. “To me that was crazy,” Yeung said. “We have all these engineers filling out detailed surveys about the quality and features of these cars. There’s got to be some great sh-t in there.” Yeung went and accessed the data—which at the time, in the early 1990s, required cracking into a mainframe computer—and delivered a thick report of what he found to a vice president.
One of Yeung’s favorite engine-development projects underscores the myriad possibilities that power-train engineers have to toy with. Around 2005, Yeung looked over Ford’s development plan for the 3.0-liter engine that was used in the Escape compact SUV and the midsize Fusion family sedan—two of Ford’s top U.S. sellers. Yeung did a double take. No engine upgrades were planned. Normally you’d expect some sort of enhancement every few years to keep those vehicles competitive. But here, for two of Ford’s best-selling vehicles, the engines weren’t changing.
At Ford, the internal-combustion engine was still paying the bills. But it was clear that EV and battery specialists—chemists and coders—were the new rock stars.
That was weird, and Yeung couldn’t figure out why Ford would do that. Looking back, he suspects it probably had a lot to do with the financial position of Detroit’s automakers as Toyota and Honda continued to grow. At the time, though, all Yeung knew was that the auto industry never sleeps; surely the Escape’s rivals, like the Toyota RAV4 or the Honda CR-V, would be getting engine upgrades. Marketing in the car business is fueled by whatever new or enhanced vehicle attributes can be touted in multimillion-dollar advertising campaigns. Car brands want to tout more horsepower, better fuel economy, a smoother ride, or a bigger touchscreen.
“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” Yeung asked his boss of the nonexistent engine plans. “This is going into two of our cornerstone vehicles.” His inquiries were mostly ignored. So Yeung decided to freelance an engine upgrade in his spare time.
He recalibrated the engine—fiddling with a higher horsepower by adjusting the valve train, getting more air into the combustion chamber. That required longer, higher-pressure intake runners—a channel that funnels as much of the air-and-fuel mixture into the cylinder as possible. Yeung jury-rigged a mock-up of his concept and found it worked, but he would need more than that to move forward. He needed to make sure the changes would not only boost the engine’s horsepower, but also eke out a bit more efficiency and maintain a smooth drive.
Yeung knew he needed a combustion expert—someone to figure out the precise air-and-fuel ratio that would deliver the most punch as efficiently as possible. One of the best at Ford was Steve Penkevich, a company lifer and native of Michigan’s rural Upper Peninsula, whose title was “combustion technical specialist.” Yeung barely knew Penkevich, who was about five years older and had been at Ford longer. When he approached him to gauge interest in the stealth project, Penkevich jumped at the chance.
Penkevich was every bit the power-train zealot as Yeung—at one point he worked on track simulations for Ford’s NASCAR racing engines. A mid-cycle upgrade to an engine that goes into a family car was, on paper, far less exciting. But not to Penkevich. “That’s the sort of project where the gasoline in your blood starts pumping,” he would say years later.
Penkevich remembers the thrill of gathering a ragtag team of power-train engineers into a nondescript conference room to hash over strategies for boosting the Fusion engine’s performance. “I think I know exactly how to change that cylinder head if you want to get more power out of it,” he recalls saying. “And I think we can do it without making a big tear-up.” Power-train strategizing sessions like that, he recalls, were like “watching The Big Bang Theory—a lot of like-minded guys all breaking into geek talk, and all trying to solve the same problem.”
In the end, the project was barely a blip in the annals of automotive product development: It boosted the Fusion’s output by roughly 40 horsepower, to 240 hp (30 kilowatts, to 180 kW), which was still below that of rival midsize sedans, but at least more competitive. Penkevich was so proud of it, his wife was still driving an Escape with that engine 12 years later.
Yeung was just happy he finally got buy-in for his under-the-radar project. “Sweet, I didn’t get fired,” he remembers thinking.
Ford and GM Duel Over EV Investment
When Yeung got the buyout email from HR, electric vehicles were still barely noticeable on the U.S. automotive sales charts. At GM, Volkswagen, Ford, and other big car companies, EVs accounted for less than 2 percent of sales—and they were money losers. Overall, just 3 percent of all U.S. new-car sales were fully electric models, and Tesla accounted for roughly three-quarters of those. To the outsider, the electric-car revolution seemed like an abstract, faraway idea.
And yet, inside the car companies, the hard pivot to electrics was in full swing and upending a century of internal order. A generation of engineers like Yeung were feeling pressure. In 2018, Ford executives boasted that they would dole out US $11 billion over the next few years to develop electric cars. In 2020, GM said it would invest $20 billion in EVs, along with driverless tech. Ford a year later said $30 billion. GM came back with $35 billion. Ford in early 2022 upped the ante yet again, to $50 billion.
Developing a new engine program can cost hundreds of millions of dollars, even north of $1 billion, and involve hundreds of suppliers. According to research firm S&P Global Mobility, in 2011, car companies globally rolled out almost 70 new engine families—a base engine that can be used as the foundation for several variants. By 2018, the number of new engine families was 20. In 2021, it was five. The research firm expected the number to reach zero this decade, meaning virtually no engines are being designed from scratch. Sure, gas and diesel engines will be in showrooms for a few decades to come. And gas-electric hybrids are going to figure more prominently in this transition than many carmakers had expected even just a couple of years ago. But the expectation is that car companies will stop sinking money into the machine that they’d spent a century working to perfect.
The industry’s EV push is reversing a collective decision made more than a century ago, when electrics competed with internal-combustion vehicles and even steam-powered automobiles to become the power train of choice for the car business. Around the turn of the 20th century, cars powered by electric motors outnumbered those running on gasoline in the United States. It was like a higher-stakes version of Betamax versus VHS videotape.
An article from the July 1900 issue of The Automobile Magazine delved into the contradictions of electric cars in a way that’s eerily contemporary: “In cleanliness, ease of management and safety, it has ideal qualities,” it read. “Its great cost, its excessive weight and the various shortcomings of the storage battery, together with its extremely limited radius, combine to limit its field to certain forms of urban use.”
By the early 1900s, the reliability and quality of gas engines had improved with innovations like the electric starter and ignition system, both invented by engineer Charles F. Kettering, who became the longtime head of research at GM. And though gas stations were just emerging, hardware stores sold cans of petroleum. Meanwhile, electricity generation outside big cities was scarce, and motorists with electric cars had range anxiety.
New Engine Development Dwindles
Gasoline engines won out. Henry Ford’s assembly-line innovations dramatically drove down the cost of vehicle assembly. That made his mass-produced gas-engine Model Ts far cheaper than the electric cars sold by dozens of upstart companies. As road systems improved, Americans wanted to travel further, which also favored gas cars.
In the ensuing decades, generations of power-train engineers around the world toiled to refine the machine that powered global transportation. They made the internal-combustion engine more powerful, smoother, more responsive, more compact—and critically, more fuel efficient.
Over the decades, attributes like engine size, shape, and even how an engine was cooled—air or water—became grist for legendary debates among car enthusiasts. Names like Jaguar’s straight-six engine and Chevrolet’s small-block V-8 denoted the size and layout of the engine’s cylinders, but also became powerful brands unto themselves. Car companies built entire marketing campaigns around their engines, with names like the Cadillac Northstar and the Dodge Hemi.
The power train was once so central to a car brand’s identity that, for decades, GM operated separate engine-development divisions for most of its brands. The idea was that, if the engine was the heart of the automobile, then each brand should have its own bespoke motors, at least for larger, more expensive cars. In 1965, GM offered more than 25 different gas engines across its Chevrolet, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, and Buick brands, nearly all developed, tested, and manufactured separately from one another.
Eventually, even GM—for much of the 20th century the world’s largest and most profitable corporation—came around to the cost-cutting revelation that its brands could share components or even entire engines without vehicle owners noticing. By the mid-1970s, GM had quietly begun joint engine development among its brands, sharing parts and in some cases using essentially the same engine in cars from different marques. That saved money, but back then, the notion of the engine being central to the car’s identity was so ingrained in consumers’ minds that the discovery of GM’s move boiled over into a PR crisis.
GM’s Oldsmobile Delta 88 sparked outrage in 1977 when it came to light that the company had replaced the car’s V-8 engine with a down-market Chevy engine of the same size—an early sign of engine consolidation in the auto industry. Prior to that, GM had been operating separate engine-development divisions for most of its brands. Greg Gjerdingen/Wikipedia
In 1977, a Chicago man named Joseph Siwek brought his Oldsmobile Delta 88 big sedan in for engine work. His mechanic ordered a few replacement parts, but when they came in, he discovered that some of them didn’t fit. Eventually it was determined that the 350-cubic-inch-displacement V-8 engine in his Oldsmobile was in fact a down-market Chevy engine of the same size. GM was sued for false advertising, triggering national news coverage of GM’s “engine scandal” and a multiyear legal headache. Eventually, a federal jury awarded some Oldsmobile owners $550 refunds, costing GM about $8 million.
That didn’t stop the consolidation though. The 25 different engines GM used in 1965 are gone. In the mid-2020s, the company uses fewer than a dozen different gas and diesel engines for all its U.S. cars today.
BYD and Tesla Electric Vehicle Sales Surprised Incumbents
Yeung was just one soldier in an army of power-train engineers whose collective problem-solving abilities and earnest sleuthing helped evolve the internal-combustion engine and solve some of the industry’s most vexing engineering challenges.
The U.S. Clean Air Act in 1970 required car companies to reduce the pollution that their tailpipes were spewing. Catalytic converters were added to reduce toxic fumes. New injection systems were developed to spray fuel directly into the engine’s combustion chamber, boosting power and efficiency. Companies added more gears to transmissions to help engines run more optimally, also saving fuel. Eventually, hybrid gas-electric cars, popularized by the Toyota Prius, developed in the late 1990s, deployed a small battery pack and electric motor to significantly enhance fuel economy.
For the 2022 model year, U.S. vehicles averaged 26.4 miles per gallon (9 liters per 100 kilometers)—roughly double from 13.1 mpg for 1975 models, according to Environmental Protection Agency data. The amount of greenhouse-gas-producing carbon dioxide that U.S. vehicles belched out was roughly cut in half per car over that period, the EPA says, much of it thanks to power-train engineers.
By the late 2010s, car executives were facing tightening regulations globally. Carbon-emissions rules in Europe had gotten so strict that some automakers were being threatened with fines of $100 million or more if they couldn’t improve their emissions. Auto execs were concluding that they would never be able to wring enough efficiencies from the internal-combustion engine to meet the rules in the long run.
At Ford, that sentiment wouldn’t have come as any surprise to Yeung. He had seen all the new engine programs dry up. It made him uneasy, not just about his own future, but about the future of Ford, the company that had sustained him and his family for more than 50 years.
In Yeung’s view, the ability to engineer, refine, and produce gas and diesel power trains was the secret sauce of the auto industry for a century. It was so complex, you had to be among the biggest corporations on the planet, with the deepest of pockets, to do it at scale. It gave the big car companies huge barriers to entry that allowed them to operate for decades with virtually no newcomers. There essentially were no startups of note, until Tesla, a hundred years into the car business, when it started selling refined electric sedans with head-turning designs direct to consumers.
Now, as Ford and other U.S. automakers pivot to electrics, they are competing with big players around the world like Samsung, LG, and Panasonic, which are big dogs in batteries. Electric motors are largely the domain of Asian players big and small, including Japan’s Nidec Corp. and many low-cost options in China. The stuff is relatively easy to put together into a vehicle package. Some car execs have compared it to snapping a Lego set together.
Yeung is not convinced the incumbent car companies can establish enough expertise in EVs to stay on top. They’re losing their competitive advantage, their expertise. They’re losing guys like Lem Yeung and Steve Penkevich. The built-in advantages that the incumbent carmakers wielded for more than a century are disappearing as cars become less mechanical and more infused with complex software. They are entering a race in which they’re starting from behind, with companies that suffer none of their legacy drag. Tesla and China’s ascendant BYD—and a slew of other Chinese EV upstarts—are outmaneuvering the GMs and Volkswagens on lower-cost battery setups and consumer-friendly tech features. Thinking like a car company has flipped to become a disadvantage.
“EV technology is not that difficult. It’s just modular,” Yeung says. “Ford can learn to build and house their batteries and their motors, but honestly, the innovation level on a motor and the ability to do it uniquely versus an engine? They won’t be able to do it cheaply enough. I don’t think the auto industry is going to innovate in battery technology or electric motors. I think all the barriers to entry have gone.”
Yeung had come to these conclusions long before that HR email landed atop his inbox. His buddy Steve Penkevich had concluded the same, having taken early retirement eight months earlier, in December 2020, at age 59.
Yeung clicked accept.
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