Visiting the body shop at Ford’s vast River Rouge site is a disorienting experience. The factory in Dearborn, near Detroit, is eerily quiet compared with the din in most such plants. It is entirely devoid of the showers of sparks that normally leap out from robots welding panels into vehicle bodies.
The relative quiet at the site, where the F-150 pick-up truck is put together, reflects a revolution in manufacturing techniques as Ford has shifted from constructing the vehicle bodies from steel to fashioning them out of aluminium. Most of the aluminium is screwed, riveted or glued together, while a few critical components are welded with highly concentrated – non spark-producing – lasers.
The changes to manufacturing processes are only one of a significant number of operational, financial and commercial risks that Ford is taking on in overhauling the F-150. The F-150 – the best-selling vehicle in North America for the past 32 years – is the flagship of a truck line-up that some analysts estimate provides 90 per cent of Ford’s worldwide profits.