Mubasher: Ford Motor Company on Monday announced plans to scale up its investments in electric vehicles (EVs), which is now considered a rapidly growing industry.

The company said it will invest up to $11 billion to develop 40 electric cars by 2022, Ford’s president of global markets Jim Farley said at the Detroit auto show.

In 2015, the giant American automaker said it would spend $4.5 billion on the EV industry until 2030.

“We believe man-made CO2 is contributing to climate change and we’ve got our part to play,” Raj Nair, head of Ford’s North American operations, noted.

Local and foreign rivals such as Volkswagen, General Motors, and Toyota have announced similar ambitious plans in the EV industry.

"We're all in on this and we're taking our mainstream vehicles, our most iconic vehicles, and we're electrifying them. If we want to be successful with electrification, we have to do it with vehicles that are already popular," the automaker’s chairman Bill Ford told reporters during the event.