The truck plant is supposed to produce a new battery-powered F-Series pickup truck, following the previously announced F-150 Lightning, but Ford declined to disclose details about it.
The two plants in Kentucky will be in Glendale, about 50 miles south of Louisville, and are expected to create 5,000 jobs, at a cost of $5.8 billion. The batteries made there will be used at North American plants that will produce Ford and Lincoln electric vehicles. Ford already employs about 13,000 people at two truck and S.U.V. plants in the Louisville area.
“We have enormous demand for our electric vehicles now, and this is going to help us accelerate,” Ford’s chief executive, Jim Farley, said in an interview. “This is going to give us a million units of supply just for Ford.”
This year, Ford began selling an electric S.U.V., the Mustang Mach-E, which has taken market share from Tesla. The company plans to add an electric delivery van by the end of the year and the electric F-150 Lightning next spring.
The company said people and businesses had placed 150,000 reservations for the F-150 Lightning. The strong interest persuaded Ford to invest an additional $250 million in the Dearborn, Mich., plant where the Lightning will be made, increasing potential production and adding 450 jobs.
The U.A.W. is hoping to represent the production workers at the four new plants. But it will have to win approval from employees to do so. For the U.A.W. contract with Ford to apply at the electric-truck plant, a majority of eligible workers would need to sign cards backing the union; at the battery plants that would be a joint venture, unionization efforts would have to start from scratch.
While the union represents tens of thousands of workers assembling cars and making major parts for Ford, G.M. and Stellantis, it has struggled to organize workers at the factories of foreign automakers and their suppliers. Many of those plants are in the South, where workers and conservative politicians view unions more skeptically.