Ford Motor Co. has abandoned a C$1.8-billion plan to build electric vehicles at its Oakville, Ontario assembly plant.
“The company announced Thursday that it will be producing its popular F-series Super Duty pickup trucks in Oakville beginning in 2026, putting 1,800 employees back to work, but also ditching its plans to produce electric SUVs at the plant beginning in 2027,” the Toronto Star reports.
“This investment will benefit Ford, our employees in Canada and the U.S., and especially our customers who want and need Super Duty for their lives and livelihoods,” said Ford Chief Operating Officer Kumar Galhotra.
The new plan will increase Ford’s new investment to $3 billion, Electric Autonomy Canada says, while boosting the number of jobs created by 400. There was no word on the $295 million the federal and Ontario government had each committed to support the EV expansion.
“We are in touch with the company to better determine and understand next steps following the announcement,” Audrey Milette, a spokesperson for Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne, told the Star.
Ontario Economic Development Minister Vic Fedeli said he was “thrilled” with an announcement that “puts 1,800 workers back at the plant a year early.” The provincial subsidy was keyed to the number of jobs involved, he added, “so we’ll continue to have a look at all of the numbers and make any final adjustments.”
The news was a 180° shift from what Ford was saying just 15 months ago when it pushed Oakville forward as “a Canadian hub of electric vehicle manufacturing,” part of its strategy to build a “global production run rate” of two million EVs per year by the end of 2026.
“The new campus—to be renamed Oakville Electric Vehicle Complex—will be a high-volume manufacturing hub for North American EV production, repurposing existing buildings into a state-of-the-art facility that leverages Oakville’s experienced work force,” the automaker said in mid-April, 2023. “Ford will begin to retool and transform the Oakville complex in the second quarter of 2024 to prepare for production of next-generation electric vehicles beginning in 2025.”
“Canada and the Oakville complex will play a vital role in our Ford+ transformation,” Ford President and CEO Jim Farley declared at the time. “It will be a modern, super-efficient, vertically integrated site for battery and vehicle assembly. I’m most excited for the world to see the incredible next-generation electric and fully digitally connected vehicles produced in Oakville.”
But in early April, 2024, Ford announced it was “retiming” the launch of its electric three-row SUVs in Oakville to 2027. A “comprehensive overhaul” to prepare the plant for EV production was still expected to start in the second quarter of this year.
“We value our Canadian teammates and appreciate that this delay will have an impact on this excellent team,” Farley said in that release. “We are fully committed to manufacturing in Canada and believe this decision will help us build a profitably growing business for the long term.”
Now, Electric Autonomy reports, Ford says its electric SUVs will be manufactured elsewhere, at a location still to be announced. “Ford attributes the switch to the fact that its Ohio Assembly Plant and Kentucky Truck Plant in the United States are operating at full capacity and unable to keep up with the increasing demand for its Super Duty pickups.”
Unifor welcomed the announcement, noting that it would get workers back on the job in 2026 rather than 2027. In a statement, the union said the Oakville plant will begin rolling out electric trucks “later this decade”.
Ford’s EV sales “saw a significant 86% increase in the first quarter of 2024, with hybrid sales also rising by 42% compared to the previous year,” Electric Autonomy writes.
