Building an EV program team without hiring 80 people

The default assumption is that a real EV program needs a real OEM team — 60 to 100 engineers across chassis, battery, electrical, software, and homologation. For a venture-stage company, that headcount is a death sentence on burn rate before the first prototype rolls.

What we see working instead is a small core team (often 6–12 people) of program leadership, vehicle architects, and a senior software lead, paired with a development partner that brings the rest of the disciplines on demand. The core team owns the product and the decisions. The partner brings the muscle on chassis, battery integration, DV, and homologation.

This only works if two things are true. First, the core team has to be senior enough to actually make decisions — not just relay them. Second, the partnership has to be set up as a shared program, not a vendor contract, with co-located reviews and a single risk register.

Done well, this model gets a credible vehicle to pilot with a fraction of the headcount, and leaves the company with a team it can actually scale into production — instead of one it has to lay off after SOP.