Last week, Toyota Motor Corporation announced it plans to invest an additional $1.3 billion to further electric vehicle (EV) production at its plant in Kentucky, where Industrial Info is tracking $13.75 billion worth of active and planned Industrial Manufacturing projects. About $10 billion of the investment activity is attributed to EV-related projects.
The investment at Toyota’s 8.1 million-square-foot vehicle assembly and engines plant in Georgetown, which is the company’s largest production facility in the world, will allow for the assembly of an all-new, three-row battery electric SUV for the US market. The investment also will add a battery pack assembly line to the facility.
Toyota did not announce a planned kickoff or completion date for the project, but Industrial Info is tracking a tentative kickoff date of January 2025. Subscribers to Industrial Info’s Global Market Intelligence (GMI) Industrial Manufacturing Project Database can click here to read a detailed project report.
The investment builds on a roughly $500 million upgrade project at the plant, which is expected to begin construction in March, to convert the facility to EV production. Toyota also is wrapping up a roughly $500 million plant expansion to begin production of fuel-cell systems for Kenworth‘s (Kirkland, Washington) new line of zero-emission heavy-duty trucks.
But Toyota isn’t the only major automaker advancing its EV production in Kentucky. In Glendale, BlueOvalSK, a joint venture of Ford Motor Company (Dearborn, Michigan) and SK Innovation (Seoul, South Korea), is constructing a new four million-square-foot, $3.48 billion battery-manufacturing plant with a manufacturing capacity of 43 gigawatt-hours of batteries per year.
The batteries will be used to power Ford’s all-electric F-series pickup truck as well as other Ford and Lincoln EVs produced at North American assembly plants. The project is expected to be completed in 2025.
Ford also is at work on non-EV projects, including a $700 million expansion and retooling project at its truck assembly plant in Louisville, to increase production capacity of internal combustion engine Super Duty trucks, as well as the automaker’s Expedition and Lincoln Navigator models. The project is expected to wrap up later this year.
The highest-valued non-automotive Industrial Manufacturing project in Kentucky is the construction of clean-energy storage company EnerVenue‘s (Fremont, California) new, one-million-square-foot gigafactory in Shelbyville. The $264 million project will enable the company to design, manufacture and test its nickel-hydrogen batteries used in utility-scale, commercial and residential energy-storage applications. The project is expected to wrap up toward the end of the year and is the initial phase of a proposed $1 billion, two-phase project at the plant
Industrial Info is tracking three projects underway from United Parcel Service Incorporated (Atlanta, Georgia), all of which are expected to wrap up by the end of May. This includes the construction of a new $220 million aircraft and maintenance facility at the Louisville International Airport, which entails building a two-bay, 275,000-square-foot hangar to perform maintenance on the delivery company’s growing air fleet.
Also underway is the construction of two grassroot warehouse/distribution centers, in Louisville and Shepherdsville. Both of the one-million-square-foot facilities will support regional distribution operations.
Insights compiled by Industrial Info Resources (IIR), a top provider of industrial market intelligence. Subscribers to Industrial Info’s GMI Database can click here for a full list of detailed reports for projects mentioned in this article, and click here for a full list of related plant profiles.
Filed Under: Technology News