In mid-April 2015, the Detroit, Michigan-based Ford Motor Company announced total commitment of US $2.5 billion new investment dollars to be directed toward three expansion projects related to its already sizable Mexican operations.

Much of this sum will go to the expansion of the company’s passenger vehicle engine plant. The facility is located in Chihuahua, the capitol of one of Mexico’s most industrialized entities, the State of Chihuahua. The present expansion of plant from its current size of approximately twenty-two acres of production space to a future ninety-one and one-half acres “under roof” will create an eventual manufacturing capacity that will result in ten percent of Ford’s worldwide passenger vehicle engines being manufactured in Mexico.

When the expansion of the Ford Chihuahua engine plant is complete, one thousand units of production will roll from its assembly line annually. Incorporated into the product will be new technology that has been developed specifically for use in the company’s new line of compact vehicles.

Gabriel Lopez, the president and general director of Ford Mexico, recently explained that, as things stand today, “sixty percent of the material inputs of which the motors will be made are manufactured in Mexico by local suppliers.” Part of Ford Mexico’s overall strategy for the country is to fortify its base of suppliers even more. Of the aforementioned one million engines for compact cars that will eventually roll off of the assembly lines at the Chihuahua plant annually, about four hundred thousand of them will be exported from Mexico to the United States, as well as to several Asian Pacific nations.

The physical act of expanding the Ford Chihuahua engine plant began in earnest on Monday, April 27, 2015. It has been announced through official channels that the additional size and capacity of the Ford Chihuahua engine plant will generate an addition five hundred direct labor positions. With ninety year presence in Mexico, Ford was one of the first motor vehicle manufacturers to make locate production operations in the country. From limited beginnings, today Ford employs eleven thousand three hundred workers in Mexico. Among the vehicles currently being manufactured in Mexico are the Ford Fiesta, Fusion and Lincoln MKZ, as well as the hybrid versions of both.