Todd Hoevener

Born in Columbus, Indiana, south of Indianapolis, Todd Hoevener grew up on a farm. He earned his undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering from Rose Holman Institute of Technology in Terre Haute in 1988 and went to work for Ford

- Gary Witzenburg

By 1995, while working full time, he had added an engineering master’s degree and an MBA by attending night school at the University of Michigan, Dearborn. “I wanted the dual degree to build up both technical and business acumen,” he says. “And I worked to get it done before we started having kids.”

He started as a test engineer and moved up through a series of jobs, including managing Ford’s global non-product spending, chassis engineering, and full-vehicle dynamics and NVH (noise, vibration, and harshness) engineering. Next, he managed assembly plant product development teams at Ford’s Flat Rock and Wixom plants in Michigan. “Living day-to-day in a plant and understanding how it works built up my manufacturing expertise and really helped me in design-for-assembly, a very good skill to have when you’re designing a new product.”

Hoevener then worked as a vehicle engineering manager on the previous-generation Explorer and Sport Trac, then the new unibody Explorer launched in ’10, and he was assistant chief engineer on the previous generation Expedition. He moved to Ford Australia as chief engineer for the international Ranger pickup and Everest, a body-on frame three-row utility sold in Asia-Pacific and other global markets. “That was a very old vehicle, so I got to reinvent it,” he says. Then he returned to totally redesign Expedition (and Lincoln Navigator).

Truck Trend: What is “design for assembly”?

Todd Hoevener: I’m always looking at whether a design may be too much labor on the line or a difficult angle to get a tool into or too much line-side complexity. If you have one mirror, there’s one box on the line. Ten variants of mirrors means 10 boxes.