Ford investing $75M to switch Michigan Truck plant from trucks to cars

News flash: small cars like the Ford Focus are selling beyond expectations (ours anyway) while trucks and SUVs are sitting on dealer lots much longer than auto manufacturers would like. For this reason, Ford is moving as quickly as possible to switch a few of its truck plants into car plants, including its Michigan Truck plant where behemoth SUVs like the Expedition and Navigator were being built. The switchover is going to cost the automaker since these are not flexible manufacturing facilities, with the first bit of retooling ringing the registers to the tune of $75 million bucks -- and that's just for a new bodyshop. The total cost to retool the plant will be in the hundreds of millions. As they say, it takes money to make money. While the plant is being refurbished, workers will be shuffled to the nearby Wayne plant to build even more Focuses. The best bit of news, though, is that Ford will finally be building its small cars from Europe at its converted truck plant, the ones we've all been asking for since the Euro-Focus got a new platform and we didn't. Not that we're still sour or anything...