- Ford’s Louisville Assembly Plant in Kentucky made gas-powered cars for more than 70 years.
- Now it has been converted to make fully electric models only, starting with the Fathom next year.
- Retooling is a massive undertaking which Ford finished in less than a year.
Ford’s slow drip of new information about the $30,000 Fathom electric truck continues with yet another update.
The Dearborn automaker said Thursday that its Louisville Assembly Plant in Kentucky has completed a $2 billion retooling for the Fathom’s production. The massive undertaking took less than a year after the plant stopped building the Escape and Lincoln Corsair. Ford shared a lot of numbers to convey the scale of the project—numbers that probably won’t make much difference in your life. But in case you’re interested in knowing, we’ll share them anyway.
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Source: Ford
The Louisville Assembly Plant itself is over 70 years old, which means Ford had to get rid of decades worth of equipment used to build gas-powered vehicles. Over the past few months, demolition crews removed 25,000 tons of old manufacturing equipment, hauling it away in more than 2,600 truckloads for recycling. Ford then poured concrete across 230,000 square feet of floor space to prepare the plant for its radically different Universal EV Production System.
And this is where things get interesting. Instead of building cars the old-fashioned way, which is along a single moving assembly line with workers and robots adding parts to a vehicle piece by piece, Ford is rethinking the process with what it calls an “assembly tree.”
Three major sections of the vehicle are built separately and brought together toward the end using bolts and adhesives. The front and rear subassemblies are built independently, while a third section contains the structural battery, seats, consoles and carpeting. Ford had to retrain its workers for the new process at its New Model Product Development Center in Allen Park, Michigan.
A Ford Fathom subassembly at the newly retooled Louisville Assembly Plant.
Photo by: Ford
Ford says the system has several advantages. Chief among them is that workers no longer have to contort themselves into awkward positions to install components inside the cabin, such as the dashboard and seats. With the Universal EV Production System, the seat is bolted to the rear subassembly before the vehicle’s structure gets in the way.
The dashboard—which Ford says contains the most components—can similarly be installed with operators standing directly in front of the front subassembly. Think of it as assembling a car on a kitchen counter, with all ingredients in front of you ready to get cooked together.
“We listened to all the things operators don’t like,” Bryce Currie, Ford chief manufacturing officer, said in a statement. “Their work at Louisville Assembly Plant will be significantly more ergonomic. It’s designed to require less twisting, turning, and bending.”
Ford expects the new system to cut net assembly time by 15%. And the benefits aren’t limited to simpler manufacturing and fewer sore backs, either. Ford says the new process also makes it easier to handle software.
Photo by: Ford
Previously, Ford would build the car first and then update its software. If something was wrong, fixing it could take 10 minutes per vehicle. Ford is now installing and updating software on the car’s individual computers before they’re installed in the vehicle. The factory’s apparently now gets really fast internet speeds which let workers test and update the modules while the car is still being assembled, catching problems earlier and saving time.
Of course, doing things differently doesn’t automatically make the assembly tree better than the conventional moving assembly line. Not yet, at least. That system has been refined for more than a century, and Ford itself pioneered the modern moving assembly line more than 100 years ago.
Automakers like Toyota spent decades obsessively refining the process with things like lean manufacturing principles, which called for detecting abnormalities early so that defects didn’t continue along the line in more vehicles. This philosophy pretty much went into every car factory over the years.
But radical change might be exactly what Ford needs. The automaker has fallen behind in the EV race, and the Fathom is its biggest opportunity yet to make a comeback and make an affordable EV at scale.
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