I first thought Ford CEO Jim Farley was briefing me on a new car. It turned out to be something altogether more ambitious: a completely new way to make a car. Or, more precisely, electric vehicles.

“I was born in Poland, and after the Second World War we didn’t have anything. Toys didn’t really exist,” remembers Marian Gradus, standing in his Northamptonshire office, in the UK, the walls all ...