Ford made a $2 billion bet two years ago when it closed its Louisville Assembly Plant in Kentucky and scrapped the assembly line system it had used for more than a century. Its goal was to transform the factory into one capable of making a new generation of affordable EVs.
The auto giant provided an update on Thursday, stating that its factory overhaul is on track and in 2027 will be ready to start producing the Fathom, an all-electric midsize truck that costs less than $30,000 and is the first EV built on its new universal platform.
Ford said it expects to begin prototype builds of the Fathom in the first quarter of 2027, with customer vehicles to follow later in the year. The U.S. automaker is already testing production-level tooling ahead of the prototypes.
The stakes for Ford are high. The company’s previous EV efforts were a drag on its profitability, while Chinese competitors and Tesla leapt ahead with vehicles that sell at volume and with a profit margin.
To catch up, Ford ditched the moving assembly line system that its founder Henry Ford launched and turned to a system developed by its skunkworks team led by former Tesla executive Alan Clarke.
This “universal production system,” as Ford calls it, uses a three-branched assembly tree. Ford will use large single-piece aluminum unicastings that use far fewer parts — a technique that Tesla has popularized — and that will allow the front and rear of the vehicle to be assembled separately on two of the branches. The third branch is where the structural battery will be assembled with seats, consoles, and carpeting. The three components will come together at the end of the line to form the vehicle.
As part of the factory rebuild, Ford has also nearly tripled the Wi-Fi coverage density in the factory to 1,080 access points to the kind of high-bandwidth, low-latency connectivity required for software quality checks.
Ford said it will be able to assemble the Fathom a net 15% faster than the former vehicles that were built at the Louisville plant.
The company said some employees have already spent months training on the new system at its New Models Program Development Center in Allen Park, Michigan.
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