Ford is delaying manufacturing at one in every of two EV battery crops positioned on a typical website in Kentucky, the Louisville Courier Journal studies.
Citing lower-than-expected demand for EVs, Ford will proceed manufacturing of the 2 crops comprising the BlueOval SK Battery Park, a three way partnership with battery provider SK On within the state that is being financed with a part of a $9.2 billion authorities mortgage. But one plant’s opening has been placed on maintain.
The first plant stays on observe to open in 2025. The second plant was initially slated to start manufacturing in 2026, however that date is now unsure.
BlueOvalSK Battery Park – rendering, September 2021
“The first (plant) is full speed ahead,” Ford spokesperson T.R. Reid advised the paper. “The transition to EVs is continuing without interruption, but it’s gonna happen a little bit more slowly than we originally anticipated.”
The affected battery plant is on one in every of two mammoth manufacturing complexes introduced in 2021, in Kentucky and Tennessee, a part of an $11.4 billion funding by the automaker. The Tennessee website, dubbed Blue Oval City, will embrace a car meeting plant and provider park along with its personal battery park. Ford confirmed to the Courier Journal that the Tennessee plant stays on schedule to start manufacturing in 2025.
Ford in 2021 mentioned that the Blue Oval City plant and twin Battery Park crops will permit a mixed annual capability of 129 gigawatt-hours of battery manufacturing for next-generation EVs. That features a new electrical pickup truck, to be assembled on the Blue Oval City complicated, that Ford has mentioned targets “incredibly high volume.”
BlueOvalSK Battery Park – rendering, September 2021
CEO Jim Farley has teased this next-generation truck, which not like the present F-150 Lightning is predicted to be constructed on a devoted EV platform, because the “Millennium Falcon of Trucks.” He’s additionally assured it’s going to permit Ford to retain present truck prospects within the face of the Tesla Cybertruck, which Farley beforehand mentioned was “for Silicon Valley people.”
The pickup is a part of a era of EVs being “radically simplified” to make use of smaller batteries and be extra environment friendly, Ford claims.
Source: www.greencarreports.com