Ford Motor Co., will begin a $1.8-billion retooling project at the Oakville Assembly Complex in the second quarter of next year, furloughing a large number of production staff for about six months as it prepares the Toronto-area plant to build battery-electric vehicles by the start of 2025.
Preparations for the retrofit work that will begin in “less than a year” are already under way, as Ford readies the Oakville plant for the electric era, said Bev Goodman, CEO of Ford of Canada.
“We’re thrilled that Canada and the employees of Oakville assembly are ready to play an important part of this incredible transformation.” Goodman said April 11 in a conference call ahead of the announcement.
Ford said salaried and skilled trades employees, as well as some production staff will remain on the job during the six-month retooling project. An undisclosed number of salaried staff will be furloughed by mid-2024, but scheduled to return to work by the end of the year.
The plant employs about 3,000 workers today building the Ford Edge and Lincoln Nautilus, most of them members of Unifor Local 707. The company expects little change to staffing levels at the facility once EV production begins.
Marc Brennan, Local 707 chairperson for the plant, told Automotive News Canada that the retooling timeline provides certainty to union members, who can now plan accordingly.
The relatively short amount of downtime also came as a relief to Unifor, which was told the plant retrofit could last up to 16 months when it negotiated for the $1.8 billion investment during 2020 contract negotiations, Brennan said.
“For them to compress the retooling period down to about six months, is definitely welcome news for our members, especially with the amount of downtime they’ve already incurred over the past three years.”
The company and union have not determined the number of hourly workers that will remain in the plant during the retooling process, but Brennan expects that detail to be sorted out shortly.
Unifor also aims to have members undergo as much training as possible during the shutdown period to minimize lost wages.
“Any opportunity we have to get our members training during the retool period, we’ll take advantage of that.”
'USING ALL OF ITS INFRASTRUCTURE'
Dave Nowicki, director of manufacturing operations, battery and electric vehicles for Ford, said the $1.8-billion retooling project, which received $590 million in joint support from the federal and Ontario governments, will overhaul the plant’s existing footprint.
“We’re using all of its infrastructure — from the land itself to the buildings and even its roads — to quickly prepare for a new generation of manufacturing,” he said during the April 11 conference call.”
Among other major changes, Ford plans to consolidate the assembly site’s three existing body shops into one.
“This not only should save time on our future assembly process, it should allow us to further improve build quality,” Nowicki said, crediting the clean-sheet design of the company’s EVs for the smaller footprint.
Ford’s renewed Oakville campus will also house a 407,000 square-foot (38,000 square-metre) battery pack assembly building. Here, the company will assemble battery cells sourced from its BlueOvalSK facility in Kentucky into battery packs ready to be integrated into the EVs built on-site.
“When production on the all-new EV begins here, battery packs will arrive on the assembly line in minutes, not hours. This kind of vertical integration drives incredible freight savings and timing efficiencies, even as we’re delivering EVs at a very high scale,” Nowicki said.
As part of the plant transformation, the 487-acre (197 hectare) site will also be renamed to the Oakville Electric Vehicle Complex.
The Ontario investment is part of Ford’s plan to reach annual output of two million EVs globally by 2026.
Despite sharing the timeline for the retooling work, Ford did not disclose what vehicles the Oakville plant will build. Goodman said specific product details will be disclosed “when the time is right.”
But the automaker appears to be gearing up to build two SUVs.
U.S.-based forecasting company AutoForecast Solutions told Automotive News Canada in November it expects the plant to build battery-electric versions of the Ford Explorer and Lincoln Aviator. In February, parts supplier Magna International Inc., said it would be building battery enclosures for the electric Explorer and Aviator programs destined for the Oakville plant.
Ford’s retooled Ontario campus is scheduled to enter pre-production on battery-electric vehicles by late 2024 and production by 2025.
