By John 
Ford could soon be staring down temporary job cuts at its Dearborn Truck plant, all thanks to a nasty bottleneck in aluminum supplies for the F-150—the crown jewel of Ford’s lineup. The wrench in the gears? A catastrophic fire that gutted a crucial aluminum plant in Oswego, NY, almost four weeks back, and now the dominoes are starting to fall.
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That inferno on September 16 tore through Novelis’ facility, one of America’s biggest players in automotive aluminum. Flames raged for close to a day, leaving chunks of the place in ashes and production dead in the water. Workers got out safe, but the aftermath? Chaos up and down the supply chain.
Here’s the kicker: Novelis fed over a third of the aluminum used in U.S. auto manufacturing. So, naturally, giants like Ford are feeling the squeeze hard. The Dearborn plant cranks out F-150s by the boatload, and most of those lightweight panels? Yep, straight from Oswego. Insider whispers say layoffs and pauses on the line could hit as early as next week.
Analysts are crunching numbers, and they’re ugly—somewhere between half a billion and a cool $1 billion in sales evaporating or production grinding to a crawl. And good luck scrambling for backups. Domestic suppliers are already stretched razor-thin, and importing? Forget about it without swallowing tariffs that’ll run you 50% extra.
Oh, and that scorched Novelis site? Don’t hold your breath. Rebuilding could drag into 2026, which means Ford and other manufacturers are scrambling like mad to lock down any spare aluminum they can find. Because if they don’t? Well, let’s just say those assembly lines won’t stay humming for long.
Source
Shawn Henry