Ford to Make Its Own Electric Vehicle Batteries at New Detroit-Area Plant

Ford Motor has announced plans to open a battery development center near Detroit by the end of 2022.

According to the company, the lab will be a 200,000-square-foot facility with the equipment to design, test and do small-scale manufacturing of battery cells and packs. The center will also develop electronic controls.

The goal is for Ford to manufacture its own batteries on a large scale.

Ford hopes the move also ensures they'll have enough batteries for what the company predicts is a shift to electric cars instead of traditional engines.

“We now see that the market is going to develop very quickly, and we will have sufficient scale to justify having greater levels of integration,” Hau Thai-Tang, Ford's chief product and operations officer, said in a statement. “We will no longer take an approach of hedging our bets and planning around the uncertainty of how fast that will play out.”

The battery center will be called Ford Ion Park and employ roughly 150 workers in the beginning, some of which will be brought in from other Ford sites.