Ford Motor Co. announced Monday that it is taking big steps into the electric vehicle market with three new battery factories, an electric truck plant, and 11,000 new jobs.
Formed as a partnership with South Korean battery cell provider SK Innovation, the project reportedly costs approximately $11 billion. Ford plans to shoulder over $7 billion of the cost — the largest single investment in Ford’s history. The planned assembly and battery plants will be located in Tennessee and Kentucky.
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Competition from Tesla and pressure from environmentalists have pushed the automotive industry toward electric cars. Sensing that demand for electric cars is going to explode within the decade, Ford pledged to spend $30 billion to shift toward electric vehicles, and it projects that 40% of its sales will be electric by 2030.
“I think the industry is on a fast road to electrification,” Ford Executive Chairman William C. Ford Jr. told the New York Times. “And those who aren’t are going to be left behind.”
While automobile manufacturers have been pivoting toward electric vehicles, computer chip shortages have threatened the transition. Ford wants to circumvent the supply chain issues by making its chips and batteries in-house.
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The plants, bringing over 5,000 jobs to both Tennessee and Kentucky, will reportedly be larger than the Ford flagship plant in the Detroit, Michigan, area and aim to be carbon-neutral. The site in Tennessee will be called Blue Oval City, in reference to the company’s logo, and it will contain an assembly plant for electric trucks and a battery plant on 6 square miles near the town of Stanton.
The smaller Kentucky site, BlueOvalSK Battery Park, will have two identical lithium-ion battery plants near the town of Glendale.
The factories are set to begin production by 2025.
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Tags: News, Electric Vehicles, Ford, Kentucky, Tennessee, Carbon
Original Author: Virginia Aabram
Original Location: Ford announces new factories in shift toward electric vehicles
