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The average new vehicle in America costs more than $50,000. If that seems high, it makes more sense when you consider that the Ford F-Series pickup is a close runner-up for America’s best-selling vehicle, and you can’t get one for less than $42,620. In fact, it’s easy to spec one that costs more than double that, and many buyers do.
For those reasons, it’s not surprising that Ford is looking for ways to increase F-150 production next year, particularly after a supplier bottleneck slowed manufacturing in the fall. What is surprising is how much weight the company is throwing behind full-size trucks. Ford plans to build 50,000 more of them in 2026, and it plans to hire 1,000 more employees to make that possible, the company announced Thursday.
Part of the impetus for this is, in Ford’s words, to “recover production losses stemming from the fire at supplier Novelis’ Oswego, New York, aluminum plant.” That fire happened in mid-September, and Ford estimates the knock-on effect that’s had on its ability to pump out pickups has cost the automaker $2 billion this quarter. Novelis expects to be fully back online in December, and Ford CEO Jim Farley recently visited the site to survey the situation.
So, Ford hopes to make up for lost F-150 production this year in 2026. But it’s also pulling resources from the battery-electric Lightning truck to accomplish that goal—and it’s more than a matter of where the aluminum goes.
Ford says that Lightning production will “remain paused,” and that “hourly employees at the Rouge Electric Vehicle Center,” where the Lightning is made, “will transfer next door to Dearborn Truck Plant.” There’s no end date given for this by the way; just an announcement of a “new third crew” at the Dearborn Truck Plant, and additional personnel at its Louisville, Kentucky facility, where Super Duty is built.
Ford moved 460,915 units of F-Series last year—a decrease of 5% annually and almost 15,000 units behind the Toyota RAV4, which totaled 475,193 in 2024 sales, per Jato Dynamics via Forbes. In other words, Ford’s already cranking out a ton of trucks, and it’s hoping it can cross the half-million threshold next year. The automaker estimates that the F-Series year-end figure could be as much as 100,000 lower in 2025 due to the Novelis fire.
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Backed by a decade of covering cars and consumer tech, Adam Ismail is a Senior Editor at The Drive, focused on curating and producing the site’s slate of daily stories.
