Images Courtesy Ford Motor Company

In great news for Blue Oval lovers (and the American economy in general), Ford Motor Company announced plans to add an additional 200,000 units of capacity for 2013. They’ll also improve production by an additional 40,000 units by cutting the traditional two-week summer shutdown to only one week.

Currently 75 percent of the company’s North American plants are running at three-crew, three-shift or four-crew patterns to ensure that Ford dealerships don’t run dry of the products that are selling well. The 200,00 additional units will come from the Chicago Assembly Plant, Flat Rock Assembly Plant, and Kansas City Assembly Plant. The increased production will include some of the company’s most popular vehicles – the Explorer, Fusion, and F-Series pickup trucks.

We recently told you about one of the planned increases, at the Kansas City Assembly Plant, with the third crew building F-150’s, which is included in the 200,000-vehicle increase announced today. Twenty more plants, including six of the company’s assembly plants, will take a reduced summer shutdown this year to keep up with the increased demand. Those plants include the Buffalo Stamping Plant, Chicago Stamping Plant, Dearborn Engine, Dearborn Tool & Die, Lima Engine Plant, and Woodhaven Forging facilities. 

This is the second year in a row that Ford has taken the reduced-shutdown schedule to meet strong demand, which is a great indicator of how things are going at our favorite car company. Overall, they expect to add nearly 3,500 hourly jobs in 2013, and the company is on-track to meet its internal goal of adding 12,000 hourly jobs in the United States by 2015. The company added more than 8,000 salaried and hourly jobs in 2012 alone – who needs a government handout, anyway?