Ford’s Louisville, Kentucky, assembly plant feels like a classic American car factory. On the Ford Escape and Lincoln Corsair production line, workers wiped sweat from their foreheads, while their yellow safety vests were stained with dirt and grease.
The air carried no scent, but the usual cacophony of machines, robots and clanging metal had gone silent, replaced by the whirring of loud fans when the line seemed briefly paused so workers could hear from CEO Jim Farley himself. He was there to announce a $2 billion plant upgrade to build a $30,000 electric truck on a new platform with a radically different manufacturing process.
The Escape and Corsair, made on the same line, will end production this year as the plant retools for EV production starting in 2027. Ford said it has secured 2,200 manufacturing jobs for the next chapter of this plant, far fewer than the 3,300+ workers the plant currently employs. About 600 workers will be offered buyouts or jobs at other Ford truck and SUV plants.
Those who remain will be retrained to build the new EV. Ford and at least one representative of the United Auto Workers union believe the next-generation assembly process will be far less physically taxing.
While car manufacturing has become significantly simpler, thanks to higher levels of robotization and increased focus on worker safety, the process is still demanding physically, at least to a certain degree.
For example, workers may have to place dashboards, seats and door panels into tight spaces. Tasks like fitting wiring harnesses might require crouching and kneeling. And even though robotic arms might do the heavy-duty stuff, humans are still needed to snap parts into place or put in seals and bolts.
Now, after a century of perfecting the moving assembly line, Ford is moving on to the next generation of manufacturing. The automaker says it is the first in the world to introduce an “assembly tree” in which three subassemblies are built in parallel and then joined.
“The modules will come in completely open,” said Bryce Currie, Ford’s vice president of Americas manufacturing. “The vehicle will arrive in front of you with all the components in the right orientation, the scanners, the power tools, the screens built right there as you move it forward. There’s less twisting, turning and bending,” he said.
Ford projects the Louisville line will be 40% faster, the new truck will use half the number of fasteners and the part count will drop by 20% compared with a “typical vehicle."
“One of our mantras is, the best part is no part,” said Doug Field, Ford’s chief EV, Digital and Design Officer. “If we pull this off, you will never put an instrument panel or a seat through a door opening again,” he told workers.
Part of what will make this possible is the use of “unicastings,” which Ford stresses are different from the gigacastings Tesla uses. Gigacasting is the use of massive, high-pressure die-casting machines to produce large, single-piece vehicle components, such as an EV’s front or rear underbody, instead of assembling them from many smaller parts. The Tesla Model Y and Cybertruck both use these types of single-piece large parts.
“Giga just means bigger and bigger,” said Alan Clarke, the Executive Director of Ford’s Advanced Electric Vehicle Development Program. “Uni puts a name to the ambition of making a car in one shot. That’s where the industry is headed, to get to the Hot Wheels car—to make it in a single shot.”
Other changes are smaller but still could turn out to be meaningful for workers. Ford is getting rid of what it calls a “pop clamp,” which is the “next generation of the hose clamp.” In automotive applications, this clamp is a metal or plastic band tightened around a hose, such as a radiator or fuel line, to secure it to a fitting and prevent fluid, coolant, or air leaks. It’s a tiny tool, but a big pain point for line operators because it only works as intended “sometimes,” Clarke said.
He added that some of Ford's employees gave a “visceral reaction” when they heard that the clamps were now gone, replaced by “quick connects.”
We also have some firsthand experience with vehicle assembly here at InsideEVs. Writer Iulian Dnistran, once got a chance to work on an assembly line at one of Ford’s factories in Europe all the way back in 2014. “I remember sweating like an Olympic athlete after struggling to install the carpet through one of the door openings without holding up the entire line,” Iulian said in his explainer of how Ford’s new EV production process works. “One small mistake would put the whole line on hold, which means fewer cars would be built that day, and less money made,” he says.
Now it seems like Ford is trying to alleviate such stresses, both for the EV and for the workers. Part of the $2 billion investment will go toward upskilling workers for this new process.
It's too early to say whether the investment will pay off, but Brandon Reisinger seemed optimistic. The United Auto Workers chairperson at the Louisville Assembly Plant said he sees a tangible benefit for the workers with the new production process.
“We should have a healthier workforce, and they should be able to go home to their families and not be sore at the end of the day,” Reisinger said.
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