Ford’s Oakville Assembly Complex will next year be transformed to assemble electric vehicles and battery packs.J.P. MOCZULSKI/The Globe and Mail
Ford Motor Co. F-N says its factory in Oakville, Ont., will be the first high-volume facility to produce electric passenger cars in Canada for the North American market by 2025.
Ford’s Oakville Assembly Complex, which opened in 1953, will next year be transformed to assemble Ford and Lincoln electric vehicles and battery packs with a previously announced $1.8-billion investment, Bev Goodman, Ford of Canada’s chief executive officer, told reporters on Tuesday.
Ms. Goodman declined to say how many cars the factory would produce each year, nor say which models would be made there. The investment includes $580-million in taxpayers’ money.
“This plant will have the flexibility to build multiple [models],” she said.
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The Oakville site now makes the Ford Edge and Lincoln Nautilus, and employs about 3,000 people. Production workers will be laid off while salaried and skilled trades staff will stay on for the six-month retooling, scheduled to begin in the second quarter of 2024, said Tony Savoni, plant manager at the 487-acre site just west of Toronto.
The Oakville factory includes an assembly building, three body shops and a paint facility – all of which will be retooled. Ford will add a 407,000-square-foot plant in which the car battery packs will be assembled from cells and components trucked in from Ford’s Blue Oval factory in Tennessee.
“We have a lot of work to do,” Mr. Savoni said on a webcast press conference.
A repurposed Oakville site can be ready to make cars more than two years faster than a new facility, said Dave Nowicki, Ford’s director of manufacturing for EVs. “Here we’re able to use nearly 100 per cent of Oakville’s infrastructure – infrastructure that has long been paid for,” Mr. Nowicki said.
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Ford makes the Mustang EV in Cuautitlan Izcalli, Mexico, a low-volume assembly line. Mr. Nowicki said the Oakville site will be first to be converted to make large numbers of electric cars for the North American market.
The Oakville plant, to be renamed Oakville Electric Vehicle Complex, is key to Detroit-based Ford’s plan to make two million EVs a year at plants around the world by the end of 2026. It’s making the shift as governments increasingly impose EV quotas on an auto sector that has mainly produced internal combustion engines, which burn fossil fuels and are major contributors to climate change.
The Canadian government requires 20 per cent of new vehicles sold by 2026 to be emissions-free, rising to 100 per cent by 2035.
The shift to electric cars is changing the makeup of Ontario’s auto sector.
In December, General Motors began producing the electric cargo van BrightDrop EV600 at its retooled plant in Ingersoll, Ont. Stellantis NV has said it will spend $3.6-billion – including up to $1-billion in government funding – to convert its Ontario factories to EVs.