Ford Spending $3B to Build More Super Duty Trucks

Barely three months after Ford CEO Jim Farley admitted to investors that the company couldn’t meet demand for its redesigned Super Duty truck, the Blue Oval has announced a solution: A third assembly plant in North America.

That lucky plant is at Oakville Assembly Complex in Ontario, about 340 miles northeast of Detroit and about 22 miles southwest of Toronto. Starting in 2026, Oakville will build up to 100,000 Super Dutys per year. Ford has secured approximately 1800 jobs at Oakville Assembly and is adding 150 jobs at the Windsor Engine Complex, which builds V-8 engines for the trucks. The cost to install assembly and stamping operations at Oakville? $2.3 billion.

“Super Duty is a vital tool for businesses and people around the world, and even with our Kentucky Truck Plant and Ohio Assembly Plant running flat out, we can’t meet the demand,” says Farley.

Most of the money may be going to Oakville, but not all of it. Ford plans to invest a total of $3 billion into solving the issue of Super Duty production, and some of the remaining $700 million is going to the 10 U.S. plants that support production of the truck by building components.

The transmission plant in Sharonville, Ohio, gets $24M and additional overtime. Rawsonville Components Plant, which builds transmission oil pumps, air induction systems, ignition coils, carbon canisters, and fuel pumps, gets $1M and 20 new jobs (as of April 2024, the plant employed 756 people, approximately 656 of which are paid by the hour). The operation in Sterling, Michigan, that makes rear axles for the F-250 (and for the Expedition, Navigator, and Mustang) gets 50 new jobs (as of April 2024, it employed about 2313 employees, including 2084 hourly ones).

This isn’t the first time that Ford has spent a billion or more on its newest Super Duty. In November of last year, Ford was scrambling to address recalls—it had the most of any automotive manufacturer through 2022 and into the first half of 2023, as Ford Authority writes. It was so desperate that it shut down Kentucky Truck (for as long as three days at a time) to bring hundreds of quality inspectors, suppliers, and engineers into the plant. The idea was to fix issues before trucks shipped to customers. Farley revealed, in another investor call, that he spent over a billion addressing quality issues on the Super Duty alone.

Ford had planned to build electric vehicles at Oakville in 2025, a project which would have added 1400 jobs, switched the name of the site to Oakville Electric Vehicle Complex, and allowed union-represented employees to return in 2027. Those people can now return in 2026, thanks to ravenous demand for the Super Duty, and the site appears to be keeping its current name.

A final tidbit of information in the press release lies in the phrase “multi-energy technology.” Ford appears to be considering hybridization for its cash cow—no surprise, given that the light-duty F-Series has incorporated the tech for years now. Ford isn’t saying anything about a timeline, however, and since it just rehauled the Super Duty for the 2023 model year, we wouldn’t expect a hybrid model for another several years, at least.

Are you, or someone you know, among the 500,000 people Ford estimates to be either directly or indirectly involved in producing its trucks? We’re curious to hear what you think about these changes.

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