The Ford Louisville Assembly Plant is getting closer to reopening after temporarily going dark in December 2025 as it prepares for a new model of vehicle production.
Now, one year after Michigan-based Ford Motor Co. announced its plan to invest $2 billion into the retooling of the Louisville Assembly Plant to become the production home of its newest all electric truck, company officials said the automaker is "on track" to launch the new Ford Fathom in 2027.
Bringing the Fathom — a new four-door midsize EV truck with starting suggested retail price of $28,350 — to life isn't just reshaping Ford's lineup as the Ford Escape and Lincoln Corsair SUVs production are replaced. It's fundamentally transforming the assembly facility off Fern Valley Road, officials said.
"I'm really excited for that next chapter as we go through our tooling tryout, and then we get into start building units with the hourly workforce and really starting to see that come to life," Kevin Young, advanced manufacturing program chief at Ford, said. "I'm really excited for that."
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The Ford Fathom, the name of which was revealed on Aug. 6, will be the first vehicle produced on Ford's new Universal EV Platform.
For LAP to go from producing gas powered SUVs to an EV truck, the factory's assembly lines had to be striped out and new production lines installed, a project that is slated to take place in one year's time.
Rather than utilizing the single long conveyor style assembly line that Henry Ford, the founder of Ford Motor, popularized, the Fathom will be built on Ford's new assembly tree system.
The new Universal Electric Vehicle Production System splits the vehicle into three sections — front, rear, and battery deck — which enables better assembly access for workers and allows more people to work on the vehicle simultaneously.
Brian McGauley, plant manager at LAP, told The Courier Journal that the demo of the building has been completed and the newly installed tooling and machinery is currently being tested and validated as some early renditions of the new vehicle roll down the line.
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"It's going to be more operator friendly," McGauley said of the new assembly model.
Part of Ford's goal as it creates this new assembly process was to make it more ergonomic for workers, meaning less bending and twisting awkwardly to install car parts. The new three section production model allows workers to build the vehicles head on and brings the vehicle together through a "marriage" as the three pieces are connected.
"What we've done by being able to break up the front and the rear, and the floor is that now you have essentially freed up more surface area, and you have a lot more ways that you can install it," Young said. "Instead of having to twist or to bend into the car, you're going to be standing as if you're working on a workbench."
Ford anticipates prototype builds assembled with production qualified parts will begin in the first quarter of 2027. From there, as the automaker proves it can build these vehicles at the right quality for consumers and the supply chain supporting the new vehicle grows, it expects to ramp up production and start getting vehicles to consumers later in 2027.
"You have to crawl before you can walk and walk before you can run," Young said. "We are bit by bit just trying to make sure that we can we can install it and put the process together."
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The company has not released its expected volume for Fathom, but Young said Ford is bullish on the new EV truck and hopes once preorders for the vehicle open in early 2027, "we are completely sold out."
Ahead of building vehicles at the revamped LAP, workers from Louisville have traveled to Michigan where they've worked alongside teams at Ford's New Model Product Development Center to test production-level tooling ahead of prototypes being built on the line. McGauley said this cohort of workers will help train the rest of the LAP workforce as people start matriculating back to work in the near future. An exact return to work date was not shared.
Additionally, workers will get trained in a new state-of-the-art training center Ford is building and will utilize a work simulation lab to actually get an idea of what the new tools feel like and how the vehicle parts connect together.
"We've got a vehicle that's so exciting that people are going to be proud to come to work here," said McGauley. "They're going to be proud to build the Ford Fathom."
Contact Business Reporter Olivia Evans at [email protected] or at 502-582-4144.
This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: Ford Louisville plant 'on track' as it converts to manufacture new EV truck