Ford Motor Company (NYSE:F), together with its South Korean partner SK Innovation Co Ltd (KRX:096770), is investing $11.4 billion to build two production grounds to boost electric vehicle production. This is the biggest single manufacturing investment by the carmaker ever.
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Growing Capacity
According to CNN, Ford’s share of the investment corresponds to $7 billion and will create more than 10,000 new jobs. “Ford previously announced it will spend $30 billion by 2025 on its shift to building more electric vehicles and that it expects 40% of its sales, worldwide, to be fully electric vehicles by 2030.”
The two production facilities will be located in the U.S., one in Kentucky and the other in Tennessee, and they will include three factories in charge of building the electric batteries, plus an additional one to assemble electric pick-up trucks.
Ford chief operating officer Lisa Drake was quoted as saying: “The EV future is going to transform over the next few decades, and we want to be able to grow the capacity as the EV market expands.”
She further revealed that the Tennessee facilities would be 3,600 acres in size and would be called Blue Oval City –it will be three times the size of the company’s River Rouge Complex in Michigan.
Around 5,800 people will be working at this manufacturing campus, which comprises a battery manufacturing facility as well as a battery recycling compound. Also, it will sport an assembly plant dedicated to building the fully-electric F-series trucks.
Kentucky Investment
“The smaller facility, to be built in Kentucky, will be called BlueOvalSK Battery Park. SK Innovations is working with Ford on battery manufacturing, and the Kentucky site will employ another 5,000 people,” CNN reports.
In these facilities, Ford will be partnering with SK Innovation to build lithium-ion batteries in two dedicated factories.
“These two plants will be identical in size and layout to the third battery factory in Tennessee. All three battery factories were designed to be exactly the same.”
Ford is betting hard on automotive electrification. The company announced it is executing a $525 million investment across the U.S. in the next five years to train electric vehicle repair technicians.
Ford is part of the Entrepreneur Index, which tracks 60 of the largest publicly traded companies managed by their founders or their founders' families.
