The New Yorker - USA (2022-01-31)

(Antfer) #1

THENEWYORKER,JANUARY31, 2022 45


automakers mirrored the well-being of
the country, I want to believe that Ford
can innovate in a way that preserves the
pleasure I get from my F-150—a satis-
faction that comes not only from its per-
sonal utility but also from the opportu-
nity to help haul stuff for friends and
neighbors—while reducing its emissions
and the hazard it could pose on the road.
But I recognize that the price we pay for
this Panglossian scenario may well be a
plenitude of pickups.

I


n mid-November, I toured the Rouge
Electric Vehicle Center, in Dearborn,
Michigan, where the F-150 Lightning
is being assembled in a new, five-hun-
dred-thousand-square-foot “advanced
manufacturing” plant. I was now one of
the two hundred thousand people who
had placed a deposit on a Lightning.
Even though, in response to demand,
Ford has increased the Rouge Center’s
production capacity to a hundred and
fifty thousand Lightnings a year, I was
probably in for a wait of a year or more.
Inside the plant, Corey Williams, the
manager, welcomed me to “hallowed
ground.” The building is situated on a
six-hundred-acre complex on the Rouge
River which first began producing au-
tomobiles in 1927. There are eleven main
buildings. The complex is thick with
history—not just company and indus-
trial and American history but also the
history of the Ford family, and of the
thousands of Ford families like Linda
Zhang’s. Whether Ford’s epic industrial
history is its singular advantage, as it
seeks to compete with automakers like
Tesla and Rivian with no legacy in gas-
powered cars, or whether that history
will drag the company into oblivion, will
be partly resolved inside this facility
during the next decade or so.
The original Rouge was a marvel of
vertical integration, where a car could be
made from raw materials, such as iron
from Ford mines and timber from Ford
forests in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula,
in just a few days. Jim Farley, Ford’s fifty-
nine-year-old C.E.O., told me after my
visit that the symbolism of the location
is important, because “we’re going back”
to something more like Henry Ford’s
ore-to-cars model, so that Ford won’t be
so dependent on foreign battery-makers
and on imported microprocessors. Ford
is investing billions of dollars to build

electric-vehicle and battery-making plants
in Tennessee and Kentucky. The venture
is a partnership with SK Innovation, a
Korean company that is a major global
manufacturer of battery cells. Still, China
controls important ingredients of E.V.
batteries, including cobalt, which comes
primarily from Chinese-owned mines
in Congo, and it currently dominates the
processing of battery materials mined
around the world.
“We’re not going to secure our fu-
ture if we keep buying these things on
the open market with everyone else, and
buying them in Asia, where politics could
affect our supply,” Farley said. Ford has
formed a new partnership with Redwood
Materials, a battery-recycling company
launched by JB Straubel—a co-founder,
with Elon Musk, of Tesla—and hopes
that it will allow the company to obtain
crucial components from old batteries,
and not be so reliant on China. Redwood
says it can recover more than ninety-
five per cent of the critical materials in
used batteries.
I followed Williams along the mov-
ing assembly line, the production method
that Ford introduced at the Piquette Av-
enue Plant, in Detroit, in the early twen-

tieth century. In the gas-F-150 assembly
plant, a few hundred yards away from
the E.V. center, a conveyor system under
the factory floor moves the vehicles along
the line, creating a dungeon-like din. In
the new plant, autonomous, battery-
powered “skillets” containing a truck’s
chassis glide noiselessly along spotless
polished-concrete floors. At each work-
station, crews affix parts and the Light-
nings begin to assume their familiar boxy
shape. Having no fixed conveyance sys-
tem makes it easier for the company to
adjust capacity.
Another notable difference is the ab-
sence of paper checklists, which Williams
said used to be knee-high at the other
plant’s workstations; now everything
is on screens. But perhaps the most sig-
nificant difference is a dearth of human
workers. Because E.V.s contain fewer
parts, they take less work to put together,
which means fewer workers are needed.
The United Auto Workers wants to pre-
serve existing jobs. President Biden, re-
sponding to these concerns, offered up
to $12,500 in tax credits on E.V.s bought
from unionized shops, like Ford, as part
of the stalled Build Back Better bill,
making the starting price of a Lightning,

“Is there something wrong with your food?”

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