LOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP) — Ford Motor Co. will invest nearly $2 billion retooling a Kentucky factory to produce electric vehicles that it says will be more affordable, more profitable to build and will outcompete rival models.

The automaker’s top executive unveiled the new EV strategy at Ford’s Louisville Assembly Plant which, after producing gas-powered vehicles for 70 years, will be converted to manufacture electric vehicles.

“In our careers, as automobile people we’re lucky if we get to work on one, maybe two, projects that really change the face of our industry,” CEO Jim Farley told plant workers in Kentucky. “And I believe today is going to light the match as one of those projects for all of us here.”

Farley and other top executives in the auto industry say that electric vehicles are the future and there is no going back.

The first EV to roll off the revamped Louisville assembly line will be a midsize, four-door electric pickup truck in 2027 for domestic and international markets, the company said.

The new electric trucks will be powered by lower-cost batteries made at a Ford factory in Michigan. The Detroit automaker previously announced a $3 billion investment to build the battery factory.

The automaker sees this as a “Model T moment” for its EV business, a reference to revolutionary changes on the production line led by the company’s founder, Henry Ford, when it began churning out vehicles from a factory more than a century ago. Farley said the changes will upend how electric vehicles are made in the United States.

“It represents the most radical change on how we design and how we build vehicles at Ford since the Model-T,” Farley said.

The company said it will use a universal platform and production system for its EVs, essentially the underpinning of a vehicle that can be applied across a wide range of models.

The Louisville factory — one of two Ford assembly plants in Kentucky’s largest city — will be revamped to cut production costs and make assembly time faster as it’s prepared to churn out electric vehicles.

The result will be “an affordable electric vehicle that we expect to be profitable,” Farley said in an interview with The Associated Press ahead of the announcement. “This is an example of us rejuvenating our U.S. plants with the most modern manufacturing techniques.”

The new platform enables a lineup of affordable vehicles to be produced at scale, Ford said. It will reduce parts by 20 percent versus a typical vehicle, with 25 percent fewer fasteners, 40 percent fewer workstations dock-to-dock in the plant and a 15 percent faster assembly time, Ford said. The traditional assembly line will be transformed into an “assembly tree” at the Louisville plant, it said. Instead of one long conveyor, three sub-assembly lines will operate simultaneously and then join together, it said.

Other specifications for the midsize electric truck — including its reveal date, starting price, EPA-estimated battery range, battery sizes and charge times — will be announced later, the company said. Ford revealed in its release that the truck will have a targeted starting price of about $30,000.