Ford

Ford announces plans to produce 600,000 electric vehicles per year by 2023

Fred Lambert | Nov 18 2021 - 3:58 pm PT

Ford announced today that it doubled its planned electric vehicle production capacity by 2023 to 600,000 electric vehicles per year.

In the last few years, Ford has accelerated its plan to electrify its vehicle lineup multiple times.

After some delays, we are finally starting to see some progress, with the Mustang Mach-E seeing some success and the F-150 Lightning coming next year. Ford Pro also sells E-Transit medium range cargo vehicles though numbers there aren’t available.

But from the information Ford released, it still seems like high-volume production of electric vehicles was still a few years away.

Now, in a series of tweets, Ford CEO Jim Farley announced another acceleration of the company’s plans:

It's a big moment for the auto industry. Early EVs were good for the environment, but lacked emotion. Like appliances. That's changing. @Ford's bet is different. We're taking iconic vehicles—Mustang, F-150, E-Transit—and making them even better as EVs. And more are on the way.
— Jim Farley (@jimfarley98) November 18, 2021

The most important part is Farley releasing an actual number for Ford’s planned EV production volume:

“We’re approaching it like we did building ventilators and PPE for Covid. Whatever it takes, find a way. And it’s working. We are now expecting to produce 600,000 electric vehicles per year globally by end of 2023. 2x our original plan. And that’s before Blue Oval City and other EV sites coming online.”

Blue Oval City is the new facility that Ford recently announced as a giant new electric pickup truck factory with three new battery gigafactories. The new facility is expected to start production in 2025.

600,000 electric vehicles would make Ford the second-biggest EV producer by volume after Tesla, and Farley said that it is the company’s ambition to become the largest:

We aim to become the 2nd biggest EV producer within the next couple years.

Then as the huge investments we're making in EV and battery manufacturing come onstream and we rapidly expand our EV lineup, our ambition is for @Ford to become the biggest EV maker in the world.
— Jim Farley (@jimfarley98) November 18, 2021

In order to achieve that, the automaker will need to significantly increase its electric vehicle production capacity, considering it currently only has the Mustang Mach-E and E-Transit van in production.

600,000 EVs would be roughly 10% of Ford’s entire global production capacity. The company previously said it aims for 40% of its sales to be all-electric by 2030.

Electrek’s Take

I am glad that Ford released some production volume numbers, and we are starting to talk about some significant volume to achieve over just two years. This is the kind of transition we need to see.

It’s still only 60% of Tesla’s current capacity (and Tesla isn’t going to be standing still, doubling its factories in just the next 6 months), but it’s an impressive 10x ramp-up in two years.

I am curious to get an idea of the breakdown per model, since we thought that the F-150 Lightning would be the biggest opportunity for high volume, but we previously learned that Ford is aiming for just 55,000 units in 2023. That means that Ford is going to need a multiplier of that, needing to average 50K units/month of EVs.

That’s going to take a serious ramp.

We know that a Lincoln electric SUV is coming and should contribute some significant volume. The E-Transit EV van should also help, but 600,000 EVs/year next year? Consider me intrigued.

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