Dive Brief:
- Ford will invest $1.3 billion to overhaul its Oakville Assembly Complex in Ontario, Canada, for EV production, the company announced Tuesday.
- The automaker will repurpose its existing buildings to meet new manufacturing needs, as well as build a 407,000-square-foot, on-site battery assembly facility.
- Renovations at the plant will begin in Q2 2024, with plans to start producing EVs by mid-decade.
Dive Insight:
Ford’s Oakville campus already includes three body shops, one paint building and one assembly building. With the expansion, it will now include a battery assembly facility relying on cells and arrays produced at its joint venture battery park in Kentucky, according to the release. Oakville workers will assemble the battery packs, which will be installed in EVs assembled on-site.
The company’s plans in Ontario are part of the automaker’s broader effort to bring more of its EV production in-house.
The strategy is led by the company’s EV manufacturing hub in Tennessee, which will house a battery factory, assembly plant and component suppliers. At the time of BlueOval City’s groundbreaking, the automaker’s director of new footprint construction Eric Grubb called the site a “blueprint for Ford’s manufacturing facilities.”
“Canada and the Oakville complex will play a vital role in our Ford+ transformation,” President and CEO Jim Farley said in a statement. “It will be a modern, super-efficient, vertically integrated site for battery and vehicle assembly.”
