Ford adding 450 jobs to help truck demand

Sterling Heights' newly renamed Electric Powertrain Center one of impacted plants

Two weeks after a work crew installed a sign at Ford Motor Company’s renovated electric plant in Sterling Heights, the automaker took steps to show it’s more than a cosmetic change.

Ford recently announced the Van Dyke Electric Powertrain Center is one of three Michigan plants to receive a $250 million investment and an extra 450 jobs to meet demand for the new 2022 F-150 Lightning.

Ford already has taken more than 150,000 reservations for the new electric version of its immensely popular F-150 pickup truck, Kumar Galhotra, Ford’s president of the Americas, said during a news event Thursday.

“As the orders have been coming in, as the reservations have been coming in, it was just time for us to (increase) the capacity to meet that demand,” he said.

Galhotra made the announcement at the new Rouge Electric Vehicle Center in the automaker’s hometown of Dearborn, where the first pre-production trucks are being made.

Ford provided tours of the Rouge Electric Vehicle Center to members of the media as well as government officials, including Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, who said the facility “will be a place where the future is determined and built by the hard-working men and women of the UAW.”

Ford F-150 Lightning will be the catalyst that hastens America’s transition from gasoline to battery-powered vehicles. The new truck, which will be available to customers by next spring, will be able to travel up to 300 miles (480 kilometers) per battery charge and carries a starting price of around $40,000.

Ford’s $250 million investment will create 450 hourly direct jobs, with most of those workers assembling the F-150 Lightning at the Rouge Electric Vehicle Center. Workers at the Rawsonville Components Plant in Ypsilanti will assemble batteries, and the Van Dyke Electric Powertrain Center on Van Dyke Avenue at 18 Mile Road in Sterling Heights will increase its capacity to supply electric motors and electric transaxles for the Lightning.

The investment and added jobs will help increase production capacity to 80,000 trucks a year, Ford said.

“Electric vehicles aren’t a foofoo California car,” Democratic U.S. Rep. Debbie Dingell of Dearborn said. “They are what real Americans drive.”

In late August, the Sterling Heights plant formally installed a sign to signify Ford was no longer operating as the Van Dyke Transmission Plant, and switching over to its growing electric vehicle lineup,