OAKVILLE, ON—Ford Motor Co. plans to invest more than $1 billion to transform its flagship Canadian assembly plant here into a state-of-the-art hub for electric vehicle manufacturing. The 70-year-old facility will be renamed the Oakville Electric Vehicle Complex after retooling is completed by the end of next year.

The current 487-acre site includes three body shops, one paint shop and one final assembly building. The transformed campus will feature a new 407,000-square-foot on battery plant that will uses cells and modules produced at Ford’s new BlueOval SK Battery Park in Kentucky. Oakville workers will take these components and assemble battery packs that will then be installed in vehicles assembled on-site.

“Canada and the Oakville complex will play a vital role in our Ford+ transformation,” says Jim Farley, president and CEO of Ford Motor Co. “It will be a modern, super-efficient, vertically integrated site for battery and vehicle assembly.”