Ford announced today that it doubled its planned electric vehicle production capacity by 2023 to 600,000 electric vehicles per year.
In the last few years, Ford has accelerated its plan to electrify its vehicle lineup.
After some delays, we are finally starting to see some progress, with the Mustang Mach-E seeing some success and the F-150 Lightning coming next year.
But from the information Ford released, it still seems like high-volume production of electric vehicles was still a few years away.
Now, in a series of tweets, Ford CEO Jim Farley announced another acceleration of the company’s plans:
The most important part is Farley releasing an actual number for Ford’s planned EV production volume:
“We’re approaching it like we did building ventilators and PPE for Covid. Whatever it takes, find a way. And it’s working. We are now expecting to produce 600,000 electric vehicles per year globally by end of 2023. 2x our original plan. And that’s before Blue Oval City and other EV sites coming online.”
Blue Oval City is the new facility that Ford recently announced as a giant new electric pickup truck factory with three new battery gigafactories. The new facility is expected to start production in 2025.
600,000 electric vehicles would make Ford the second-biggest EV producer by volume after Tesla, and Farley said that it is the company’s ambition to become the largest:
In order to achieve that, the automaker will need to significantly increase its electric vehicle production capacity, considering it currently only has the Mustang Mach-E in production.
600,000 EVs would be roughly 10% of Ford’s entire production capacity. The company previously said it aims for 40% of its sales to be all-electric by 2030.
Electrek’s Take
I am glad that Ford released some production volume numbers, and we are starting to talk about some significant volume to achieve over just two years.
It’s still only 60% of Tesla’s current capacity, but it’s an impressive ramp 10x ramp-up in two years.
I am curious to get an idea of the breakdown per model, since we thought that the F-150 Lightning would be the biggest opportunity for high volume, but we previously learned that Ford is aiming for just 55,000 units in 2023.
I bet that the company is ramping that up significantly.
We know that a Lincoln electric SUV is coming and should contribute some significant volume. The Transit EV van should also help, but 600,000 EVs by 2023? Consider me intrigued.
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Author: Fred Lambert
Source: Electrek
