After debuting to high demand and short supply amid various constraints, the Ford F-150 Lightning has since received a bit of a boost as The Blue Oval physically increased the footprint of the Rouge Electric Vehicle Center where the EV pickup is built, while the automaker also moved 800 workers from the Dearborn Truck plant over to the Rouge facility next door and hired 300 new employees to support this expansion. Since then, both new and existing Ford F-150 Lightning inventory has been treated to a significant price cut, and today, FoMoCo announced that production of the EV pickup has officially resumed following this recent expansion at the Rouge facility.
Ford F-150 Lightning production was ultimately shut down for a total of six weeks as the automaker expanded and retooled the Rouge Electric Vehicle Center, all with an eye toward tripling the model’s total production capacity. That means that by this fall, the Rouge plant will be able to produce 150,000 Lightning pickups annually, as FoMoCo previously outlined. At its current pace, the facility is on track to build 70,000 units in the 2023 calendar year.
Ford is currently in the process of training the aforementioned 1,200 additional manufacturing employees over the next three weeks, who will utilize special equipment that automatically measures and validates exterior body fit for margin and flushness precision – the first time this technology has been used in a North American Ford plant of any kind. Additionally, a third station has been added to validate wheel alignment and headlamp aim for driver assist technology, while battery pack production at the Ford Rawsonville Components plant and the Ford Van Dyke Electric Powertrain Center has also been ramped up to match this boost.
All of these changes not only result in significantly ramped up production for the Ford F-150 Lightning, but also greater availability of the most popular trim level – the XLT – and the availability of the previously sold-out Pro model, at least in limited quantities and only for existing reservation holders.
We’ll have more on the F-150 Lightning soon, so be sure and subscribe to Ford Authority for the latest Ford F-Series news, Ford F-150 news, F-150 Lightning news, and non-stop Ford news coverage.
Comments
Trying to understand how they say they are loosing 20K or more per vehicle. Are they including 1 time startup costs? What have they done so different from Tesla that this thing costs them more than the money someone pays for it?
Yes, those eye-popping losses include the cost of investing in new plants and equipment – not just the expansion of this plant but the new battery and assembly plants in Tennessee and Kentucky too.
In fairness, Tesla lost crapload of money for a long time and only stayed afloat due to selling carbon credits and venture capital injection.
The difference is they had lines of people waiting to buy them. Ford is gonna have these trucks sitting on dealer lots not selling.
My local dealerships still want to mark it up 3k-5K if I order it through FORD. They are selling used ’22 for more than you can order a new for. Too bad that FORD didn’t stick to their original MSRP when they announced the lightning.
I giess you havent heard about the increases in material costs.
That’s wild. My dealer has several of them on the lot and they’ll offer discounts on these things under MSRP to try to move them.
3-5k over? That’s crazy. I know of a dealer in the St. Louis area marking the lightnings down 10-11k per unit, not to mention they have the same roughly 10k off all ICE F-150 units
The only thing uglier than the front end of this thing is the Tesla truck. Surely with all the engineers/designers Ford has, you can do better than this!
I think the real issue with it is how cheap the light bar and grille look. They managed to take the nice front end of the gas f150 and ruin it.by making it look cheap.
Lighting EV fueled by = coal , natural gas, and and windmills that are killing off the whales in North America. Now thats a great “green” move.
Good…i hate whales
How are windmills killing whales?
They could have DOUBLED production, just by fixing the bottlenecks in the existing trim and chassis departments!!!
They can’t possibly triple their production from this stupid waste of money they call an expansion…. There is just NOT enough people!!! They’ve been running for 2 days and the maintenance teams can’t even begin to keep up with the service calls!!!
Interesting that Ford has tripled production because I see lots sitting on dealership lots now. Demand is slowing, people are realizing the truth about EVs. They even started programs with financing and cash back.
Yay, 3x the losses incoming!
You might be right. Ford might have to give these things away to move them.
Oh, so now they can loose money 3 times faster. Ha. This is hilarious.