Today the first work-whistle sounded on the redesigned Kansas City Assembly Plant's truck division. 900 new human and 500 new robot employees will be cranking out even more 2015 Ford F-150s, but their priority isn't another super-lux Platinum rig.

No; the F-150 variant warranting its own assembly line is the SuperCab work truck with an 8' bed and heavy payload package. That's what commercial fleet buyers want, and they want a crapload of them.

Ford wrote "Kansas City exclusively builds specialty F-150s with 8-foot cargo boxes and heavy payload packages to meet the needs of commercial fleet customers," but has called to clarify that actually means the retooled Kansas City line builds several trims of the truck while Dearborn plant does not build the heavy-payload big-box versions.

I give Ford crap all the time for ambiguously reporting F-150 sales, but I guess this is a case-in-point that the demand really is insane. And for some reason the grumpy old bastard in me takes reassurance in the fact that the biggest demand still seems to be for basic-trim trucks tuned for work, goshdangit.

Now how about a tour of all the smiles and diversity at Ford's remodeled shop?! We need captions, folks. You're up.

Seriously, these people are really fired up to be working on Fords. 'Cept maybe this guy, who's definitely not sure about those 500 robot colleagues. Is their uprising still a question of "if" ...or when?

Images via Ford

Andrew P. Collins is Jalopnik's off-road and adventure guy. Shoot him an email at or hit him up on Twitter to talk trucks.