Ford on Friday (13 March) marked the official start of production of the redesigned 2015 F-150 pickup truck line at its Kansas City Assembly Plant. The model was built first at the Dearborn truck factory in Michigan.
The Kansas and Dearborn factories now have capacity to produce about 700,000 F-150 pickups a year for sales in 90 markets.
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The F-150 is Ford’s top selling vehicle model line in the US and also the country’s single most popular model.
According to just-auto data, the F-150 in full calendar year 2014 accounted for 753,851 of Ford’s 2,471,315 light vehicle sales in the US. F-series volume slipped 1.3% year on year due to the full model change during 2014; Ford’s total volume was off 0.6% last year.
In the first two months of 2015, F-150 sales rose 7% to 109,606 units, helping Ford to a 6% year on year rise to a total of 357,114 vehicles year to date.
This latest F-150 is, Ford claims, the first mass produced light-duty pickup truck with a high strength, military grade, aluminium alloy body. In addition to producing all models and cab configurations, the additional production at Kansas City now includes versions with an eight-foot cargo box and heavy payload package for commercial fleet customers.
Joe Hinrichs, Ford president, The Americas, said: “With production starting at Kansas City Assembly, we are better poised to start meeting growing customer demand for our pickup.”
Ford data showed the F-Series had its strongest sales month since 2004 in January while retail sales increased 7% last month.
“These numbers make F-Series one of Ford’s fastest-selling vehicles, at just 18 days to turn on dealer lots – well below the light-duty full-size pickup truck average of 105 days,” the automaker said in a statement.
In 2011, Ford announced a US$1.1bn spend to retool and expand Kansas City to build both the F-150 and the recently launched, UK-designed Transit full size van family which is replacing the long running domestic design E series in North America.
It took 13 weeks to upgrade the Kansas City plant to build the F-150. Upgrades included a new body shop with more than 500 new robots which use riveting and structural adhesives to make the alloy bodies, more compact robots to install roof and door panels and to transfer the trucks to final assembly, robots with cameras to scan bodies for quality checks, an updated paint shop with dirt detection technology and increased robotic paint automation, new production processes to support new features such as the 360-degree all around view camera with split-view display and a rough road test course.
Ford also hired 900 new workers for the plant.
See also: US: Buyers favour high-end F-150 versions
