Ford said on Tuesday it will spend $1.34 billion (CAD 1.8 billion) to convert its 70-year-old Oakville facility in Canada into an assembly plant for the next generation of electric vehicles.
The campus, which first opened in 1953, will be renamed the Oakville Electric Vehicle Complex. The company said Tuesday it will begin modernizing the 487-acre site in the second quarter of 2024. The upgrade includes the addition of a 407,000-square-foot battery plant that will use cells and arrays from BlueOval SK Battery Park in Kentucky. Workers will assemble components into battery packs and then install them into factory-produced electric vehicles.
“I am incredibly excited for the world to see the amazing next generation of fully digitally connected, electric vehicles being produced in Oakville,” CEO Jim Farley said in a statement.
Ford, along with its competitors, is seeking to modernize existing facilities and build new ones as they transition from internal combustion engine vehicles to electric vehicles. stronghold
Ford also announced plans to modernize its assembly plant in Cologne, Germany and build a $5.6 billion complex in Tennessee known as “BlueOval” that will be a hub for its future electric vehicles.
Ford announced in March that its BlueOval City complex outside Memphis, Tennessee, will house a truck factory capable of producing 500,000 electric vehicles annually. The first vehicle to roll off the line will be a next-generation electric truck, codenamed Project T3, in 2025.
Construction began at BlueOval City last fall. A $5.8 billion sister site in Kentucky, called BlueOvalSK Battery Park, will house a pair of battery plants.
The company also announced in 2023 plans to invest $3.5 billion to build a plant in Michigan that will make cheaper lithium iron phosphate batteries for its growing portfolio of electric vehicles.
The plant will not make nickel-manganese cobalt (NMC), a technology found in its current electric vehicles. Ford said it was working with Chinese conglomerate Amperex Technology, known as Catel. Under this arrangement, the wholly owned subsidiary of Ford will manufacture the battery cells using LFP battery cell knowledge and services provided by CATL.