November 22, 2021: -Ford Motor is planning to increase its production capacity of electric vehicles to 600,000 units by 2023, which CEO Jim Farley expects would make the company the second-largest U.S.-based producer of EVs, after Tesla.

On Thursday, According to a report from Automotive News, Farley said the increase would double the number of EVs the company had expected to produce over the next 24 months. That production is expected to be spread across Ford’s first new EVs, is the Mustang Mach-E, F-150 Lightning, and E-Transit. According to the Detroit-based publication, it would come before the show is scheduled to begin at a newly announced EV assembly plant in Tennessee.

“The demand is much higher than we expected,” Farley said. “It’s a new experience for this big company, trying to be agile. We had to approach it very differently than we’ve done capacity planning.”

It’s unclear whether 600,000 would place it second behind Tesla, and General Motors plans to sell 1 million electric vehicles globally by 2025. In its third-quarter investor update, Tesla said that the installed annual capacity at its Fremont, California, vehicle assembly plant stands at 600,000, and in Shanghai at over 450,000 cars per year. The company also builds new factories near Austin, Texas, and Berlin.

A GM spokesman said the automaker approached 300,000 EV sales globally through the first nine months of this year, mainly in China. GM also plans to convert almost four North American plants is producing vehicles with internal combustion engines to be capable of producing EVs in the future years and plants in China and Michigan that already have such cars.

Concerning the increase in EV capacity, Farley said Ford is planning to convert over 80% of reservation holders for its upcoming F-150 Lightning EV into owners. Ford says over 160,000 reservations that require a $100 fully-refundable deposit have been placed for the vehicle ahead of its arrival in dealerships by mid-2022.