China’s CATL to provide know-how for Ford’s new US$3.5 billion electric-car battery plant in US

Name: Chinese smart-battery swap stations can change EV batteries automatically
Uploaded: 2023-02-14T03:37:44.000Z
Duration: 2 min 5 s
Description: Chinese smart-battery swap stations can change EV batteries automatically

The US carmaker will be licensing the battery technology from Contemporary Amperex Technology Co

The facility is set to open in 2026 and will produce enough batteries to power 400,000 EVs a year

Reading Time:3 minutes

Why you can trust SCMP

Workers check products at a CATL facility in Ningde, southeast China’s Fujian province. Photo: Xinhua

Bloomberg

Published: 11:37am, 14 Feb 2023

Ford Motor is investing US$3.5 billion in an electric-vehicle battery plant in the US that it will operate with technology and support from a Chinese battery maker that has stirred political controversy.

The factory near Marshall, Michigan, will employ 2,500 workers, Ford said on Monday, confirming a February 10 Bloomberg report. The facility is set to open in 2026 and will produce enough batteries to power 400,000 EVs a year.

The US carmaker will be contracting the battery know-how from China’s Contemporary Amperex Technology Co, which will help set up the plant and have staff there. Ford said it will own and operate the factory and set up a wholly owned subsidiary to run it. CATL is the world’s largest battery maker for electric cars.

“Ford has control – control over the manufacturing, control over the production, control over the workforce,” Lisa Drake, Ford’s vice-president of EV industrialisation, said in a briefing with reporters. “We’re licensing that technology from CATL.”

The arrangement, aimed at securing tax benefits for the plant, has drawn criticism at a time of heightened geopolitical tension between the US and China, notably uproar over a Chinese balloon that flew over America. Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin pulled his state from consideration as a location for the factory, calling it a “Trojan horse” for the Chinese Communist Party.

02:05

Chinese smart-battery swap stations can change EV batteries automatically

“It’s very regrettable that governor Youngkin had some misinformation,” Drake said in an interview on Bloomberg Television. “We hope through today’s media announcement that it was very clear that Ford has control of the plant.”