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Ford Motor Company has increased its planned total spending on electrification to more than $30 billion by 2025, and the firm expects 40% of its global vehicle volume to be fully electric by 2030, it said in a statement.
The automaker’s boost in electric vehicle (EV) spending, which includes battery development, comes at a time when EVs, advanced connectivity and battery technologies are transforming the automobile industry.
The Michigan-based company is also creating Ford Pro, a global vehicle services and distribution business that is said to deliver new levels of productivity for business and government customers via work-ready products and services.
“We’re creating a one-stop shop to help those customers increase uptime and productivity while reducing complexity and the total cost of ownership,” Ford CEO Jim Farley said in a statement.
Ford Pro is an outcome of the Ford+ plan for growth and value creation, which is based on building enduring, always-on customer relationships along with leadership in electric vehicles and connected services, the automaker explained.
“This is our biggest opportunity for growth and value creation since Henry Ford started to scale the Model T,” Farley said.
At the centre of those capabilities is Blue Oval Intelligence, Ford’s next-generation, cloud-based platform for integrating electrical, power distribution, computing and software systems in connected Ford and Lincoln vehicles.
The carmaker said it plans to have about a million vehicles that are capable of receiving over-the-air system updates on the road by the end of this year, and scale to 33 million OTA-enabled Ford and Lincoln vehicles by 2028.
Ford’s growing EV line-up includes Mustang Mach-E, the all-electric Ford Transit, which is set to go on sale late this year, and the recently unveiled all-electric F-150 Lightning pickup truck that will be available to customers next year and will take on Tesla’s Cybertruck.
Ford at present sources its batteries from South Korea-based SK Innovation. Last week, Ford and SK Innovation announced the signing of a memorandum of understanding for a joint venture (JV) – to be called BlueOvalSK – to manufacture battery cells and arrays in the U.S.
The new JV aims to produce approximately 60-gigawatt hours (GWh) of battery cell capacity annually with the potential to expand, starting mid-decade as Ford expects annual energy demand for its vehicles to go up to 140 GWh in North America and up to 240 GWh globally by 2030.
Other American automobile firms like Tesla and General Motors have also invested in battery cell production at scale for their EVs.
The automobile giant’s investments in battery technology are aimed at equipping it to design, engineer and manufacture its own batteries, which includes creating the $185 million new battery lab called ‘Ford Ion Park’ to develop, test and build lithium-ion and solid-state vehicle battery cells and arrays with a cross-functional team of 150 experts.