Ford To Spend $1.3 Billion To Transform Canada Factory Into EV Manufacturing Hub (techcrunch.com) 38
Ford said Tuesday it will spend $1.34 billion (C$1.8B) to turn its 70-year-old Oakville facility in Canada into an assembly plant for its next-generation of electric vehicles. TechCrunch reports: The campus, which first opened in 1953, will be renamed Oakville Electric Vehicle Complex. The company said Tuesday it will begin modernizing the 487-acre site in the second quarter of 2024. The upgrade includes completely retooling the facility that currently produces the internal combustion engine-powered Ford Edge and Lincoln Nautilus to own that only produces EVs. This is the first time that Ford has completely retooled an existing plant for EVs in North America.
Ford also plans to add a 407,000-square-foot battery plant that will use cells and arrays from its BlueOval SK Battery Park in Kentucky. Workers will assemble the components into battery packs and then install them into EVs produced at the plant. "I'm most excited for the world to see the incredible next-generation electric and fully digitally connected vehicles produced in Oakville," CEO Jim Farley said in a statement.
Ford also plans to add a 407,000-square-foot battery plant that will use cells and arrays from its BlueOval SK Battery Park in Kentucky. Workers will assemble the components into battery packs and then install them into EVs produced at the plant. "I'm most excited for the world to see the incredible next-generation electric and fully digitally connected vehicles produced in Oakville," CEO Jim Farley said in a statement.
pretty solid choices (Score:3)
Canada is friendly to their EV plant, to the tune of $438M (C$590M) [detroitnews.com]. CATL is generally considered to be among the most competent LFP manufacturers, so working with them on the Michigan plant is quite an achievement (don't want to use the c word these days.)
They lost me (Score:5, Insightful)
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Get a car with good structure and keep it limping along until batteries get cheaper, then do a conversion.
Re:They lost me (Score:5, Insightful)
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. It's not like the type of motor has anything directly to do with phoning home.
Not true, ever since the phone system switched over to only using touch tones, those old rotary engines haven’t been able to call home.
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Noise reduction would be even better if EV manufactured hadn't explicitly decided to artificially add a fake noise whenever the car is running.
At higher speeds you are going to hear the ties on the road anyways
At lower speeds... well, you don't see anyone installing artificial noise makers on electric wheelchairs, do you?
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You know the artificial sound is there so that pedestrians (especially blind ones) can hear the car, right?
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Right... my point is that other low speed things like electric wheelchairs don't make any extra noise, but you don't see blind people getting hit by them every day, and they are sharing the sidewalk when them!
And at higher speeds, the sound of the tires on the road is going to be louder than many engines anyways, at least ones with a good muffler installed.
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Right... my point is that other low speed things like electric wheelchairs don't make any extra noise, but you don't see blind people getting hit by them every day, and they are sharing the sidewalk when them!
Do you think there might be a difference in how dangerous an electric wheelchair and an EV Hummer is, perhaps? There are also way fewer electric wheelchairs than cars.
Re: They lost me (Score:2)
Cyclist-pedestrian collisions can result in death or severe injury. Cyclists can go pretty damned fast and are far quieter and harder to spot than electric cars. If using a road, even just to cross it or avoid something on the footpath (sidewalk), you need to be careful.
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At lower speeds... well, you don't see anyone installing artificial noise makers on electric wheelchairs, do you?
No, but you unlikely get overrun by one either. And: I hear its engine and the breath of its occupant. No idea about you though.
And: I nearly got overrun by an electric car, approaching from behind in a marina. There was nothing to hear at all in the light wind and some seagulls shouting.
Get a clue man ...
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I would argue that you are similarly unlikely to get run over by a vehicle moving so slowly that the sound off the tires on the road is not plainly audible.
You would be wrong. Find one with an electric or a hybrid and just try it.
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Do you really think the manufacturers decided this on their own or where they mandated to do so?
Here's an article that has a link the the NHTSA doc in PDF - https://www.reviewgeek.com/150... [reviewgeek.com]
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My point is that I think the legislation is idiotic. Cars make plenty of noise on the road even without the engine noise, and at lower speeds where you theoretically might not hear the tires, there is a correspondingly lower likehood of impact.
An ICE with a good muffler can be even more quiet at low speeds than an EV with these absurd soundmakers installed.
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Sure I get and agree with your point ... just not with your finger pointing.
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Follow the money is what I say.
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Noise reduction would be even better if EV manufactured hadn't explicitly decided to artificially add a fake noise whenever the car is running.
by which you mean, required by law...
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Do laws also require mufflers to not perform above a certain threshold? No? Then I trustt you can see the glaring inconsistency.
I've seen cars with good mufflers installed that when moving slowly on a road are even *MORE* quiet than the noise that an EV noisemaker produces.
Did EV manufacturers even *TRY* to fight this legilsation, or did they just roll over and do what they were told without complaint?
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ICE cars tend to be even worse because they require computers to control the engine, in order to meet emissions and fuel efficiency regs. If you look at an EV like the Nissan Leaf, it's actually a pretty simple vehicle overall, compared to similar fossil cars. The BMS is very flexible too, it will happily handle having extra cells added to the battery and the like.
I see some manufacturers are now not allowing owners to open the bonnet. It requires a secret incantation known only to authorized technicians an
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Not so much in Canada [cer-rec.gc.ca].
The majority of our power is hydro/tidal and nuclear. Natural Gas, petroleum/oil, and coal/coke are roughly 18.6% of our total power generation and that was back in 2019.
You are still right that solar and wind aren't yet well developed here either yet though.
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I've had solar panels and inverter for 24 years.
Hydro can be controversial because of it's effects on fish populations.
Tidal is really interesting. Moon(hopefully) is not going anywhere soon.
We need a storage method better than Lithium Batteries.
I think Hydrogen. Storage is a bit complicated, but when burned it generates H2O.
There are also some interesting things with algae generated Hydrogen.
And of course Fusion would solve all our problems, and I think there's a chance for it.
Re:EV's are NOT powered by Solar and Wind (Score:4, Interesting)
First, who actually made that claim? Maybe I missed it. In truth, it depends entirely on where you live, of course. If I buy an electric car, it'll be powered by hydro, natural gas, nuclear, and a few percent also-rans. But then, WA state is sort of an outlier.
And at the very least, they're very good for concentrated populations in that they don't spew a bunch of local pollution. Still an overall win, even now. Hopefully the needle keeps moving towards cleaner power sources as old coal plants are eventually retired and newer and cleaner plants are built, but that's a slow, ongoing process that will take many years.
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Even if your power is sourced from fossil fuels, EVs are still more efficient as the Carnot efficiency of large fossil fuel plants is dramatically higher than an internal combustion engine. Plus, it is far easier to do carbon capture/sequestration at a point source like a power plant than it is on individual vehicles.
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The whole MPGe thing is extremely dumb and confusing but I did the math for our local grid which is about 40% nuclear and the rest coal & renewables, depending on the weather. At around 400g/kWh of CO2, which is what this averages, most EVs (except like the Hummer), are better than ICE, even a small diesel like a Golf. This is really easy to calculate.
You can also charge it when there's more renewable share, and it's not dependent on Saudi/russian oil. Plus the grid will hopefully get better over time.
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They are powered by Coal and Natural Gas.
Even if you charge them from coal, you still reduce lifecycle emissions, because of the vastly superior efficiency of an electric motor. That was the opposite of a mic drop, son. Go change your socks.
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Alas, the rest of us rarely have the privilege to live in a Wal-Mart.
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In other words (Score:2)
Mexico is gasoline
Canada is electricity
Who gives a sh!t? (Score:2)
It's Ford.
The company that has decided to remove AM from noncommercial EV vehicles going forward.
Despite the fact that AM radio is no less critically important for safety and communication in a privately owned car as a commercial one