As Ford Authority recently reported, the Ford BlueOval City site – which will be home to the wholly-owned Tennessee Electric Vehicle Center and represents the automaker’s largest investment in its long and illustrious history – is slated to begin EV battery production in 2027, even though production of the next-generation F-150 EV and E-Transit at that site were recently pushed back to 2028. Now, construction at BlueOval City is officially complete, a bit ahead of the scheduled start of any sort of production there.
According to the Jackson Sun, construction at BlueOval City is complete and equipment has been moved into the site, which will eventually employ 6,000 workers. Despite the fact that it won’t be building anything for a while, Marianne Dunavant, Community Relations Manager with Ford/BlueOval City, pointed out that there’s still quite a lot of work to be done, regardless. “I could tell you that, also, we felt like this pause, if you will, it’s a delay in opening, but it is not a delay in work,” she said. “Our work has not stopped.”
“We also had some concerns about – our roads are not ready, right? Our workforce, I feel like we have a little bit of work we can do there on training. We know that the infrastructure is not in place, we know that our mayors are working really, really hard to get us there. We know that the state and TDOT is working really hard on planning their piece, but had we opened when we thought that we wanted to, I think that would’ve created more chaos and set us up for failure, so I think the delay should be viewed as a good thing.”
Altogether, BlueOval City is expected to lead to the creation of around 30,000 total jobs, both direct and indirect. Thus far, 71 salaried workers have joined the team, but no hourly wage workers have been hired as of yet. Ford plans to reveal those plans and begin hiring hourly workers as it gets closer to the start of production in roughly two years or less.
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