Ford has announced it would be spending $30 billion on its Kentucky and Michigan plants, to build a new electric pickup truck, and LFP prismatic batteries. “We’re announcing… $5 billion of new investments here in Kentucky and Michigan, to build a radically new vehicle,” CEO Jim Farley said on FOX Business “Varney & Co.” Monday. This investment is expected to create 4,000 new jobs in Ford’s Battery Park and Louisville, Kentucky plants.
According to a press release, the new product is a midsize four-door truck with a starting price of about $30,000. “It’d be a lot more affordable and a lot lesser cost than an old Tesla, even, or a RAV4 hybrid imported. So we’re excited about this affordable vehicle,” Farley said.
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“Ford is the No.1 truck hybrid maker in the U.S., best-selling vehicle in the U.S. for 47 years. The F-150 comes in a hybrid. It’s almost 30% of our customers,” Farley noted. “But for people that just commute, and they could charge at home, they don’t have to depend on chargers on the road, they only go 100 miles, 200 miles a day, an EV is actually really cheap… an EV can be a really good solution.”
This electric truck would be built on an “assembly tree.” An assembly tree is what Ford calls a type of assembly line where in place of one long conveyor belt, three sub-assemblies will run down their own simultaneous productions before joining together.
“After 120 years, we’re gonna change the assembly line,” Farley said. “We’re gonna build it in three pieces, three separate parts, not one vehicle along one line. And that allows us to build it 40% faster with a lot less people and a lot less cost.” Farley also added that Ford didn’t want this to be built in South Korea or Japan, so the company took “a completely radical approach to redesign the vehicle to make it affordable and profitable here in Kentucky.”
This isn’t the first time Ford bet big on an EV. A full-sized pickup called The Lightning had debuted in 2022, however the company did not make much money on it. The Mustang Mach-E has a similar story.
These developments come at a time when the U.S. EV industry is facing a number of challenges, including the Trump administration’s efforts to roll back efforts promoting EVs, and fighting climate change. With the latest product, Ford executives have emphasized on affordability as their main selling point. The product is expected to be available to consumers in 2027.