The electric vehicle portion of Ford’s century-old Dearborn River Rouge complex, which one executive called a “manufacturing cathedral,” is still expanding as pressure mounts to produce more models.
Ford now sells three all-electric models in the U.S. — the F-150 Lightning, the e-Transit van and the Mustang Mach-e — and will begin building another electric pickup, called Project T3, in 2025 in the BlueOval City. a $5.6 billion 3,600-acre battery and vehicle mega-factory under construction in Tennessee.
BlueOval City is Ford’s largest investment in electric vehicle production to date, expected to provide around 5,700 new jobs and have the capacity to produce at least 500,000 electric vehicles annually, according to Ermal Faulkner, project site manager .
The factory project has faced delays due to weather, although construction is on schedule with the plant expected to open in 2025, he said. Some supply chain delays and battery problems have also disrupted Ford’s electric vehicle production. In February, a battery fire temporarily halted production of the F-150 Lightning.
To stay competitive, GM is producing the F-150 Lightning’s biggest rival: the new Chevy Silverado EV, an all-electric version of its best-selling pickup truck expected to launch later this year. The 4.5 million square foot factory near Detroit, which opened in 2021 and is expanding, will also make GMC Hummer electric vehicles and the Cruise Origin.GM, which plans to produce a total of 600,000 electric vehicles a year, is the only major automaker that has pledged to stop selling gasoline cars worldwide the world in 2035. .
The EV Wars: Fierce Competition for Car Buyers
Economists increasingly see increasing competition between U.S. and foreign automakers in the electric vehicle market. This includes everything from sourcing necessary battery materials to offering competitive pricing for new models. Last year, American customers bought more than 800,000 all-electric vehicles, nearly double the number in 2021 and a total of about 6% of all vehicle sales.
Competition remains fierce as legacy automakers try to catch up to Tesla, which still dominates the market with two-thirds of all electric vehicle sales and the two best-selling models in the country. Tesla has car assembly plants in the East Bay city of Fremont, as well as in Texas, Germany and China, and has invested in a $6.2 billion lithium-ion battery cell gigafactory in Nevada , with $3.6 billion more expected.
In response to Tesla’s January price cut of some of its models by 20%, Ford slashed the price of its Mach-E to $5,900.
Still, Ford and other legacy automakers like GM continue to lag behind in sales, even though in the first three months of the year, GM outsold Ford in electric cars by almost two to one.
Ford’s automotive engineers are trying to change that.
Just five miles from the Dearborn electric vehicle manufacturing plant, engineering teams behind the glassy, reflective exterior of Ford’s world headquarters are racing to design more efficient and lighter batteries. Their mission: to reduce the high initial price of their electric models.
They are rethinking battery chemistry and the components they use to hold the battery. The new batteries are one of the most important technologies in the clean energy future, said Charles Poon, the company’s director of electrified systems engineering..
Ford’s new strategy involves creating alternatives to batteries made from expensive nickel, cobalt or manganese, which are in high demand. Instead, the automaker is developing a new, cheaper technology to incorporate more batteries made of lithium-iron-phosphate. Both Tesla and VW have announced that it will be a favorite of their standard range electric vehicles in the US and European markets.
Ford is also trying to replace heavy materials in its 1,600-pound battery pack without compromising power output. The goal is to make future batteries more energy-dense, lighter and cheaper, Poon said.
“We’re working really hard on it,” Poon said. “We have new hardware technology, chemistry design and battery cell design to increase mainstream acceptance.”
Poon said the new lithium-iron-phosphate batteries would be much less expensive, resulting in more affordable vehicles than existing models. Reducing battery costs is critical because the high cost of electric vehicles is a major barrier for consumers. The average price of an electric car in February was $58,385, about $9,600 more than the average car, though down from about $65,000 last year. Low-end all-electric cars start around $27,500.
Cooperation with Chinese battery companies
Rob Williams, manager of maintenance and engineering at the Rouge Electric Vehicle Center, said delays in battery production have been one of the assembly line’s biggest challenges.
Access to critical battery minerals poses significant hurdles to meeting California’s electric vehicle requirements, said UC Davis’ Muehlegger. Ford also had to halt production in 2022 due to a shortage of computer chips, and said the industry has yet to recover from the supply chain disruptions it faced during the pandemic.
“If we’re moving very quickly to a world where a large proportion of the new car fleet will be electric vehicles and not conventional vehicles, there’s a huge amount of battery capacity that needs to be built in,” he said.
“There will be a lot of pressure to innovate in this industry. But how quickly the industry is able to innovate, and how quickly the industry moves away from the battery technologies it’s using now to two new battery technologies we haven’t discovered yet, it’s hard to know.”
