By Robb M. Stewart

 

Ford Motor Co. plans to invest 1.8 billion Canadian dollars ($1.33 billion) to transform its southern Ontario assembly complex in to a high-volume hub for electric vehicle manufacturing in Canada.

The automaker said Tuesday its manufacturing site in Oakville, west of the city of Toronto, will begin a process of retooling and modernizing in the second quarter of next year to prepare for the next generation of the company's EVs. The facility will renamed the Oakville Electric Vehicle Complex as part of what Ford said was the first commitment by a full-line auto maker to produce passenger EVs in Canada for the North American market.

The transformation of the Oakville site is part of Ford's plan to reach a global production run rate of two million electric vehicles annually by the end of 2026.

Ontario was earlier this year selected by Volkswagen AG as the site for its first battery plant outside Europe in its EV push.

Ford's current 487-acre Oakville site includes three body shops, one paint building and one assembly building. The company said the new complex will feature a new 407,000 square-foot on-site battery plant that will use cells and arrays from the BlueOval SK Battery Park in Kentucky.

The investment in Oakville will support thousands of jobs, Ontario Premier Doug Ford said.

In addition to planned upgrades at the complex in Canada, Ford said it is creating an EV manufacturing "ecosystem" in West Tennessee that will be called BlueOval City, which will be home to a battery plant and its next-generation EV pickup. Its plans also include building a lithium iron phosphate battery plant in Marshall, Mich., with production set to begin in 2026, and plans to modernize its vehicle assembly campus in Cologne, Germany, to become its first EV center in Europe producing the electric Ford Explorer for European customers.

 

Write to Robb M. Stewart at robb.stewart@wsj.com

 

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

April 11, 2023 12:11 ET (16:11 GMT)

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