Ford Faqs

Ford has closed down the F-150 pickup truck plants in Dearborn, Michigan and Louisville, Kentucky due to ‘tepid demand’. Both plants will remain closed the rest of the year. The moves are part of Ford’s efforts to “align capacity with demand,” Ms. Gattari said.

The Dearborn plant will resume production at the start of the New Year, Ms. Gattari said. Workers are also scheduled to return to the Louisville factory just after New Year’s, a person familiar with the matter said. Ford, along with Detroit competitors General Motors Corp. and Chrysler LLC, has suffered sharp sales declines among its pickups and SUVs. F-Series pickups are off 12.4% through November, while Explorer sales have plunged 23.5%, according to Autodata Corp. Overall, Ford-brand light-duty truck sales, which include pickups and SUVs, have dropped 6.1%.

Detroit’s Big Three auto makers are feeling the pain of plummeting real-estate values and surging fuel prices, both of which have sapped consumer spending. In addition, a marked decline in residential construction has damped sales of Detroit’s profitable pickups. Ford has tended to suffer the most from that trend, as its F-Series trucks are used a disproportionate amount in the home-construction business.

Ford has generally declined to discuss specific factory plans for January but George Pipas, the auto maker’s top sales analyst, said the company would likely target plants building pickups and SUVs for shutdowns or scaled-back overtime as part of the first-quarter production pullback.

Chrysler plans to halt production at truck plants in Warren, Mich., and Fenton, Mo., right before Christmas and extend the shutdown through all of January, according to people familiar with the auto maker’s plans. A third truck plant in Mexico will shut down for the first two weeks of January.

General Motors has said it will temporarily idle three pickup-truck plants for two weeks in January, in addition to the traditional holiday shutdown.