Ford is trying to turn something that has so far been a six‑figure tech party trick into a feature you’ll be able to get on a roughly $30,000 electric pickup—and do it by 2028. If it can pull this off, it won’t just be another CES headline; it’ll be Ford’s bid to redefine what “mainstream” looks like for both EVs and autonomy.​

At CES 2026, Ford laid out a simple‑sounding but very ambitious promise: its next generation of BlueCruise will support “eyes‑off” Level 3 driving on highways in 2028, starting with a new Universal Electric Vehicle (UEV) platform that debuts in a midsize electric pickup targeting about $30,000. Today’s BlueCruise lets you take your hands off the wheel on about 130,000 miles of mapped divided highways, but you still have to keep your eyes on the road; Level 3 flips that, letting the car handle the driving in defined conditions while you legitimately look away—though you still have to be ready to take over. In the U.S., only Mercedes-Benz offers something in that category right now, with Drive Pilot in California and Nevada, and it’s limited, slow‑speed, and bolted to expensive luxury sedans, which is precisely the price tier Ford says it wants to undercut.​

That pricing angle is the real story. The first vehicle on this UEV platform is a compact or midsize electric pickup planned for production around 2027, aimed at roughly the same money people spend today on a well‑specced compact SUV rather than a halo tech machine. Ford has already scrapped or delayed some of its larger, more expensive EVs and shifted focus to smaller, cheaper products, and the UEV architecture is supposed to be the backbone for a whole family of low‑cost EVs, not just one truck. Internally, executives talk about “democratizing” autonomy in much the same way smartphones democratized computing—by putting the good stuff into the devices people actually buy instead of confining it to six‑figure status symbols.​

To make the math work, Ford is betting heavily on vertical integration and a new electronic architecture that essentially turns the car into a zoned network hanging off a central “vehicle brain.” Instead of a patchwork of dozens of supplier‑built control modules sprinkled around the vehicle, Ford’s High Performance Computer Center pulls infotainment, driver‑assistance, connectivity, and audio into a single in‑house unit that it says can deliver the same or better capability at around 30 percent lower cost than buying equivalent tech off the shelf. That architecture is what’s supposed to let the $30,000 truck carry compute power and sensor fusion that, a few years ago, you’d only find in flagship luxury cars—and keep improving over time with software updates rather than being frozen the day it leaves the factory.​

The autonomy stack itself is still a bit of a black box. Ford hasn’t publicly committed to lidar—even though General Motors has already said its own “eyes‑off” Super Cruise update coming in 2028 will use cameras, radar, and lidar, starting on the Cadillac Escalade IQ. Industry reporting suggests Ford is “likely” to add lidar as well, but what the company is emphasizing in public is that it owns the entire chain from sensors to software, which gives it more flexibility to scale features and drop costs as hardware gets cheaper. Underneath all the marketing, the big open questions are the boring, hard ones: how often the system will actually be usable in the real world, what speeds and conditions it will support, how quickly regulators will sign off, and what kinds of liability automakers will formally accept.​

Then there’s the AI piece, because no CES keynote in 2026 gets out without mentioning AI at least a dozen times. Ford is rolling out an assistant that lives both in the Ford and Lincoln apps and in the vehicle itself, with the idea that you interact with the same “helper” whether you’re on your phone or behind the wheel. The example Ford likes to give is very practical: standing in a Home Depot aisle, you snap a picture of a load of lumber, and instead of guessing, you ask the Ford assistant if it will actually fit in your truck’s bed or cabin, with the system pulling on exact measurements and configuration data for your specific vehicle rather than generic internet answers. That may sound like a small quality‑of‑life feature, but it hints at the broader strategy: use AI to wrap Ford’s proprietary data—range estimates, payload, charging, service history—into something that feels more like talking to a knowledgeable friend than poking around menus.​

If all of this sounds familiar in a broader industry sense, that’s because Ford is not moving in a vacuum. GM has its own 2028 target for eyes‑off driving, Mercedes is already selling a tightly constrained Level 3 system, and Chinese groups like Geely are using CES to show that they can bring advanced driver‑assistance to market quickly and, crucially, cheaply. Ford’s UEV truck, with a mass‑market price tag and a tech spec that promises a “brainy” architecture plus AI and eyes‑off capability, is essentially a counter‑punch aimed at both premium incumbents and fast‑moving Chinese brands that are eyeing the U.S. market. The company’s executives, including Doug Field and CEO Jim Farley, have been unusually blunt that if Ford can’t hit this combination of cost, software, and capability, it will be in real trouble heading into its second century.​

There is, of course, a healthy amount of skepticism around Ford’s promise, and frankly, the company has earned some of it. Over the last few years, it has announced, revised, and sometimes canceled high‑profile EV programs, from large electric pickups to three‑row SUVs, as the economics shifted and adoption curves flattened, and you can already see that frustration bubble up in comment sections and social media threads reacting to this latest plan. Level 3 systems are also notoriously hard to execute safely at scale; they occupy an awkward middle ground where the car is in charge until it suddenly isn’t, and convincing customers to both trust the system and remain ready to take over is a human‑factors challenge as much as a technical one.​

Still, if you zoom out, this $30,000 EV platform with eyes‑off driving is less about one truck and more about Ford trying to lock in a template for how its cars will be built, powered, and updated for the next decade. A zonal, software‑defined architecture; in‑house compute; an AI layer that travels with you; subscription‑ready autonomy that’s designed to move downmarket instead of staying in the rarefied air of luxury SUVs—those are the pieces Ford is putting on the board. Whether those pieces actually add up to a $30,000 truck that can let you take your eyes off the road in 2028 is an open question, but it’s exactly the kind of bet a legacy automaker has to make if it wants to compete with both Silicon Valley and Shenzhen at the same time.​