President Joe Biden plans to tour Ford Motor Co.'s electric pickup truck plant near Detroit on May 18, the day before the automaker is set to unveil its new F-150 Lightning EV, the White House confirmed on Tuesday.
Biden is expected to get a peek inside Ford's new Rouge Electric Vehicle Center, which is adjacent to Ford's Dearborn Truck Plant at its sprawling and historic Rouge complex.
"We’re honored to host President Biden at Ford Motor Co. and excited to preview for him the new F-150 Lightning and the exciting technologies that made it possible," Ford said in an emailed statement. "Electrifying America’s best-selling vehicle is a milestone in our country’s transition to cleaner transportation. The F-150 Lightning will be built by UAW workers at an innovative, green plant on the historic Rouge complex.”
Ford has said it is investing $700 million in the new plant for the assembly of an electric version of its best-selling F-150 trucks.
Biden's visit to Dearborn comes against the backdrop of his administration's push for a $2 trillion jobs and infrastructure investment bill in Congress that includes new funding for bringing more EVs to market.
Ford has said it will add 300 jobs once the Rouge Electric Vehicle Center starts producing all-electric F-150s by the spring of 2022. Construction of the 500,000-square-foot assembly plant mostly wrapped up earlier this year.
Ford's F-Series pickups are the automaker's bread-and-butter, generating about $42 billion in revenue in 2019 from nearly 900,000 in unit sales, according to a Boston Consulting Group study. F-Series sales in the U.S. fell 12 percent to 787,422 deliveries in 2020, according to the Automotive News Data Center.
The BCG study found that Ford's F-Series trucks alone generate more revenue than major corporations such as McDonald's, Nike, Coca-Cola, Visa and Netflix.
— Automotive News reporter Michael D. Martinez contributed to this report.
