This week, Ford launched mass production of Explorer in Germany. The next day it, it was announced that the CEO FoE will leave FORD and head back to VW. Ford can't compete with EVs in Europe, everyone agrees, this was stated by the ex GM. Is Ford dead in Europe, and is it ki-ling our hope in NA?
7 replies (most recent on top)
It’s obvious, FoE needs to exit PVs in EU and focus on Pro and CVs and unfortunately EU explorer is an overpriced VW in a Ford shell (beautiful shell and kudos to EU design team). Mr Sander knew this. The rest of FoE team will take note but this move isn’t surprising.
Will this affect VW - Ford alliance? It is sure that Sander had additional insights to move right on this time of re-structuring in Europe and particularly in Germany. The company didn't want him to leave, that's obvious.
Europe is backing off BEVs so full steam ahead for Ford. D-mb
Ford needs to partnership with a more innovative automotive company like BYD. BYD has better products, better engineers, and very innovative.
Apart from ageing Kuga and Puma (and new BEV Explorer) no relevant PVs in the showrooms and probably no more Vehicles with combustion engines in the pipeline, since they have planned to go 100% electric in 2030, which would mean become irrelevant in Europe.
Any major OEM has a solid plan for the large industrialized world regions. Ford is different. Management is talking abut "iconic vehicle" (for which people would probably pay any price in order to own one) but have no idea what these vehicles would look like in Europe. Under the furniture guy the justification for lack of new vehicles was "we are focused on margin, not on volume". Now the argument is "due to lack of volume and scaling we cannot compete with large EU OEMs". Instead the organization in put under a constant maelstrom of reorganizations and layoffs. Boston Consult will probably not be able to solve the issue since it is not their task to come back with ideas for attractive products.
I'm sure Ford spent billions of hours working on multiple reorganization plans in Europe. Moving people around. Shifting job roles. Reassigning programs from one region to another. THIS is the work that management is good at.
Ford invested billions of $ in Europe the last 2- 3 years. Hopefully,it5 not wasted money