Ford Rouge Electric Vehicle Center, Dearborn, Michigan

Ford closed Dearborn Assembly on 10 May 2004. The last car off the line was a red Mustang GT convertible, and the plant came down. Sixteen years later the company announced it would build an electric truck factory on that footprint, between the Dearborn Truck Plant’s body shop and its assembly building, inside a complex that has been a National Historic Landmark since 1978. Groundbreaking was 17 September 2020. Full F-150 Lightning production started 26 April 2022, nineteen months later.

Project Scope

The original building ran 500,000 square feet as part of a $700 million investment in the F-150 lineup, with 300 new jobs attached. A September 2021 follow-on of $250 million roughly doubled target capacity. Then a 2023 expansion of 335,000 to 360,000 square feet at the north and south ends, delivered design-build by Detroit’s Devon Industrial Group at a stated $160 million, tripled annualised capacity to 150,000 units and added body-fit measurement automation. The plant restarted on 1 August 2023 after about six weeks of retooling. GENESYS Systems Integrator engineered, manufactured and installed the production system. The notable piece is what isn’t in the floor: it’s the first Ford plant without traditional in-floor conveyor lines, with AGVs moving trucks between stations instead. That matters for a retrofit inside a constrained brownfield site, because AGV routing can be changed without cutting concrete.

Why It Matters

The Rouge is the canonical vertically integrated factory, roughly a mile and a half by a mile, 93 buildings and close to 16 million square feet of floor, with its own docks, about 100 miles of interior rail, a power plant and a steel mill. It employed as many as 100,000 people and is the oldest continuously operating auto plant anywhere. Albert Kahn designed several of its buildings; William McDonough put a ten-acre sedum roof on the Dearborn Truck Plant in 2004 as part of an $18 million stormwater approach that avoided an estimated $50 million of mechanical plant. Inserting a new assembly operation into that, rather than greenfielding one in the South, was the bet. It didn’t pay off as forecast: Ford halted battery-electric Lightning production on 18 November 2025 and confirmed on 15 December that the Lightning becomes an extended-range vehicle built at the same plant. The building outlasted the product, which is the argument for building it there in the first place.

Project Team & Details