Ford’s Historic Louisville Assembly Plant To Shut Down For EV Transformation

• Ford’s 70-year-old Louisville Assembly Plant will shut down this week for retooling.
• It will be the manufacturing hub for Ford’s future EVs.
• The automaker’s $30,000 electric truck will roll out of the plant in 2027.

The Ford F-150 Lightning electric truck may officially be dead in its current form, but the automaker is now working to bring its “Model T” moment of the electric era to life. Part of that change involves a $2 billion retooling of Ford’s Louisville Assembly Plant, marking the most significant transformation in its 70-year-old history.

As the Dearborn automaker doubles down on combustion-engine technology for its full-size trucks and SUVs, its electric-vehicle strategy will refocus on the affordable end of the market. The Louisville Assembly Plant will become the launchpad for these next-generation battery-powered models.

December 17 is set to be the last day of work at the Louisville Assembly Plant as it prepares to shut down for an extended time period for retooling, Courier Journal first reported on Monday. That means it’s time to bid adieu to the Ford Escape and Lincoln Corsair crossovers, whose production will end this week.

It’s a huge moment for the Louisville Assembly Plant, which first opened in 1955 and has since been the production base for a full range of iconic Ford vehicles. At various points in its history, it produced the LTD sedans, F-Series trucks, Ranger, Bronco II, Explorer and even the Mercury Mountaineer and Mazda Navajo, which were rebadged versions of the Explorer.

From 2027 onwards, the Louisville Assembly Plant will be the manufacturing hub for Ford’s $30,000 electric truck riding on its Universal EV Platform. It will also be produced using a radical “assembly tree” production process, moving away from the century-old moving assembly line pioneered by Henry Ford in the early 1900s.

Instead, Ford’s next-gen EVs, starting with the affordable truck, will be built in three separate subassemblies that come together at the end, much like a LEGO kit. And the platform itself will be highly software-defined, incorporating cutting-edge technologies such as zonal architecture, fewer, simpler wiring and more powerful computers.

When I visited the Louisville Assembly Plant in August to attend Ford’s EV announcements, engineers said that this factory of the future would be less physically strenuous for line workers, with less bending and twisting required to install things like seats and dashboards thanks to the newer and simpler Universal EV Production system.

Some short-term disruption is inevitable, however. Ford said in August that it would employ about 2,200 workers at the retooled facility, a decline of about 600 from current levels. Those workers would be offered buyouts or transfers to other Ford factories, such as the nearby Kentucky Truck Plant.

The news comes just as Ford officially ended production of the F-150 Lightning this month, citing lukewarm demand for large electric trucks. The next-gen Lightning will instead be an extended-range electric vehicle with a gasoline generator for more than 700 miles of range, as the automaker doubles down on combustion engine tech amid slowing EV demand and the rollback of clean energy programs.

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