Ford invests $75 Mill. in order to prepare its Michigan Truck Plant for small car production

The plant will begin converting its body shop in November when the tooling and equipment specific to the Ford Expedition and Lincoln Navigator will be disassembled and transferred to Kentucky Truck Plant, which begins producing the large SUVs in the second quarter of 2009.

The move paves the way for Michigan Truck to convert to a car plant that will begin producing global C-car based vehicles in 2010.

In the interim, the plant’s 1,000 employees will be transferred next door to Wayne Assembly Plant where a third crew will be added in January to accommodate increased production of the hot-selling Ford Focus. When completed, Michigan Truck’s flexibility will allow it to augment current Ford Focus production if necessary.

Michigan Truck is one of three truck and SUV plants in North America that will be converted to build small fuel-efficient compact and subcompact vehicles.

In 2010, Cuautitlan Assembly, which currently produces F-Series pickups, will begin building the new Fiesta subcompact car for North America. Louisville Assembly, home of the Ford Explorer mid-size SUV, is slated to start production of yet more unique small vehicles from the automaker’s global C-car platform the following year.

At the heart of this manufacturing transformation is a flexible operation, which uses reprogrammable tooling in the body shop, standardized equipment in the paint shop and common-build sequence in final assembly, enabling production of multiple models in the same plant.