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Ford’s high-tech plant will be the blueprint for future facilities

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Within 12 months of revealing to the world that Ford Motor Co. would build its biggest and most high-tech plant in 119 years, the automaker has laid almost 370,000 tons of stone, the weight of not just one Statue of Liberty — the iconic New York harbor sculpture gifted to the US by France — but rather 1,600 of them, the company announced Friday.

The site, which is nearly six square miles, is no longer just a large vacant plot in Tennessee.

Now home to BlueOval City, so named for the Ford logo, both Ford of Dearborn and SK Innovation of South Korea are moving forward with their joint $5.6 billion investment in an assembly plant that will build the next “all-electric revolutionary” truck and batteries . It will be Ford’s first major presence in the deep South, a region that is home to factories owned by Honda, Toyota, Lexus, Volkswagen, Kia, Hyundai and Tesla.

Structural steel is erected a year after Ford and SK Innovation announced their $5.6 billion investment to build an all-new electric truck and advanced battery plant in West Tennessee for future Ford and Lincoln vehicles. Ford has a goal of building 2 million electric vehicles a year globally by late 2026. The site, which is nearly six square miles, will create thousands of new jobs when it is scheduled to open in 2025.

Ford CEO Jim Farley is planning to begin production at the new factory in 2025 with a goal of building 2 million electric Ford and Lincoln vehicles a year globally by the end of 2026, the company said again Friday. A year ago, the partnership revealed plans that estimated 5,800 new jobs in Kentucky.

“We are building the future right here in West Tennessee,” Eric Grubb, Ford’s director of new footprint construction, said in a statement. “This facility is the blueprint for Ford’s future manufacturing facilities and will enable Ford to help lead America’s shift to electric vehicles.”

Ford officially broke ground at BlueOval City in Stanton, Tennessee less than one year after the automaker and its partner SK Innovation announced their $5.6 billion investment to build trucks and batteries.

Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee, a Republican, said in a statement released by Ford that BlueOval City “will have a transformational impact on Tennesseans” and the economy, far beyond the Hayward County town of Stanton.

Over the past year, Ford has talked with Tennesseans who will be affected by the project, both in person and through livestreamed discussions, Ford said.

Workers on site at the BlueOval City site in Stanton, Tennessee work to get the new Ford plant open in 2025. The automaker and its partner SK Innovation of South Korea invested $5.6 billion in the electric truck and battery operation.

The construction team began preparing the land in March.

So far, Ford said, crews have:

  • Moved more than 4.6 million cubic yards of soil, enough to fill some 34,500 swimming pools.
  • Installed more than 4,600 “deep foundations,” which are water-tight steel chambers that look like chicken wire tubes that range in length from 40 to 80 feet and are used to construct the foundation. If placed end to end, the deep foundations would equal the length of approximately 176 Eiffel Tower structures.
Construction crews on the Ford factory site in Stanton, Tennessee have lined up deep foundation steel, which looks like chicken wire tubes. The automaker announced Friday, September 23, 2022 the project is on schedule.

Protecting water quality in the area is a major issue for Tennesseans.

The Memphis Sands aquifer sits beneath the project site.

“In the aquifer, sheets of clay and water-saturated sands go down 3,500 vertical feet, stacked like a layered cake. But in a thin area stretched between the Mississippi and Kentucky borderlines is an absence of clay near the surface, where rainwater can infiltrate into the ground quickly and directly replenish a water source that more than a million people rely on for drinking water,” said the Tennessee Lookout on Jan. 3, 2021.