Dive Brief:
- Orange EV will launch a new manufacturing site and corporate headquarters in Kansas City, Kansas, as part of the company's push to scale up its electric vehicle capacity.
- The 400,000-square-foot facility is slated to produce up to 1,800 EV terminal trucks per year in single-shift operations, according to a news release.
- Job openings for the facility are already posted on Orange's website, including listings for assemblers and engineers. The company plans to open the factory mid-2023.
Dive Insight:
Orange, which is currently headquartered in Riverside, Missouri, has been striving to expand its operations for months amid the national push for domestic EV manufacturing.
In August, the 10-year-old company raised $35 million in a funding round to support its growth, money it is now putting to good use.
“We've moving because orders are skyrocketing and we'll be delivering more trucks next year than we have capacity to make in our current facility," Zack Ruderman, VP of sales and marketing at Orange, said in an email. “We expect growth to continue to rapidly increase from there.”
The new location is eight times the size of Orange's current facility, ramping up the company’s manufacturing capacity from its current limit of producing 500 trucks per year in a single shift, according to Ruderman.
“Our new site enables us to continue to extend our market leadership in EV terminal trucks and begin development of new products and services for the electric truck industry,” said Wayne Mathisen, co-founder and CEO of Orange EV.
Orange has previously grown its manufacturing footprint multiple times; the company last expanded operations in 2019.
Kansas is increasingly home to EV-related manufacturing sites. In July, Panasonic announced plans for a $4 billion battery production facility to meet rising EV demand.
