Ford Motor Co. will invest nearly $2 billion retooling a Kentucky factory to produce electric vehicles that it says will be more affordable, more profitable to build, and will outcompete rival models. The automaker's top executive unveiled the new EV strategy Monday at Ford's Louisville Assembly Plant which, after producing gas-powered vehicles for 70 years, will be converted to manufacture electric vehicles. "We took a radical approach to solve a very hard challenge: Create affordable vehicles that are breakthrough in every way that matters—design, technology, performance, space and cost of ownership—and do it with American workers," Ford CEO Jim Farley said in a release.
The Big Detroit automakers have continued to transition from internal combustion engines to EV technology even as President Trump's administration unwinds incentives for automakers to go electric. Trump's massive tax and spending law targets EV incentives, including the imminent removal of a credit that saves buyers up to $7,500 on a new electric car. Yet Farley and other top execs in the auto industry say that electric vehicles are the future and there is no going back. The first EV to roll off the revamped Louisville assembly line will be a midsize, four-door electric pickup truck in 2027 for domestic and international markets. The new electric trucks will be powered by lower-cost batteries made at a Ford factory in Michigan, which Ford is investing $3 billion in building.
The automaker sees this as a "Model T moment" for its EV business—a reference to the mass-produced vehicle that launched the venerable automaker more than a century ago. But Ford says it's also a nod to the future and the vastly different way Ford says it will build electric vehicles. The new platform will reduce parts by 20% versus a typical vehicle, with 25% fewer fasteners, 40% fewer workstations dock-to-dock in the plant and a 15% faster assembly time, Ford said.
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Ford said its combined investment of about $5 billion is expected to create or secure nearly 4,000 direct jobs while strengthening the domestic supply chain with dozens of new US-based suppliers. "Nobody wants to see another good college try by a Detroit automaker to make an affordable vehicle that ends up with idled plants, layoffs and uncertainty," Farley said in the release. "So, this has to be a good business. From Day 1, we knew there was no incremental path to success. ... We reinvented the moving assembly line."
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