THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, July 1, 1996 TAG: 9606290150
SECTION: BUSINESS WEEKLY PAGE: 05 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY DAVE MAYFIELD, BUSINESS WEEKLY
LENGTH: 43 lines
Another ``Job 1'' took place last week at Ford Motor Co.'s Norfolk Assembly Plant.
The first of the new 1997 F-250 pickups rolled off the assembly line, seven months after Ford started making its less brutish and more popular sister truck, the F-150, for the '97 model year.
You've seen the '97. It's that sleek, almost pretty pickup that more and more suburbanite office types are parking in their driveways.
The truck has been an extraordinary hit. Ford has taken orders for more than 365,000 of the '97s. You can expect a six- to 16-week wait if you walked into a dealer and special-ordered one today.
Right now, only two of Ford's truck plants are making the '97s: Norfolk and Kansas City, Mo.
Its other three F-series truck factories are still cranking out the more traditional-looking '96s. They were supposed to keep doing so for a couple more months.
But the trade newspaper Automotive News reported that because of the surging demand for '97 models, two of them, in Wayne, Mich., and Oakville, Ontario, will shift to '97 production sooner than originally planned.
Wayne reportedly will switch over a week earlier than planned, and Oakville three weeks earlier.
The Norfolk plant's 2,400 workers have been assembling 45 trucks per hour. At two 10-hour shifts a day, five days a week, plus every other Saturday, that's almost 5,000 trucks a week.
``We would build more if we could physically build them,'' said Bill Boggs, the Norfolk plant's manager.
Boggs said the F-250, with its heavier-duty payload and suspension, will be a niche product.
The Norfolk plant will initially make only two an hour. It has the potential to boost that to as many as eight hourly.
Two other ``Job 1'' milestones at Norfolk today:
A new engine for the '97s, a 5.4-liter. That's in addition to the 4.6-liter for the F-250, and the 4.6 and the 4.2 for the F-150.
A new color, prairie tan. It will replace ``light saddle'' on the '97 F-series. by CNB