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Ford has big plans for Europe. Within the next three years, 20 new or facelifted cars will be launched in Europe with the blue oval. Before that is done, Ford production all over Europe is being completely rearranged, reports Automobilwoche [sub] today. The basic strategy is called “single sourcing:” Each plant will only make cars based on the same model range.
- The new Minivan B-Max will move to Craiova, Rumania.
- The successor of the Kuga moves from Germany’s Saarlouis to Valencia, Spain. Valcencia will also build the successor model of the Transit Connect and the C-Max
- Ford Cologne will build the Fiesta.
- Saarlouis will build the Focus.
- An all-new light commercial vehicle will be built at Ford’s Otosan plant in Kocaeli, Turkey, as well as the next-generation Transit commercial vehicle.
What about Southampton Assembly Plant, which also produces the Transit? It’s the last Ford assembly plant in the UK.
SHAP has just been hanging-on for a long time … nowadays, it only builds RHD vehicles and to be honest, it only exists to keep a foot in the market (and maybe to keep a bit of union-peace – don’t forget, Ford still builds quite a few engines in the UK.)
Turkey with a new light commercial vehicle? Could it be a version of the new T6-platform Ranger pick-up?? (A key question, do the Transit and the Ranger have a high-value-added something in common like the engine?)
The lack of mention leads me to assume that Mondeo/Galaxie/S-Max will continue to be bolted-together out at Genk…
The 2.2 4cyl and 3.2 5cyl diesel engines are in both vehicles, probably also the 2.5 5cyl of the Ranger T6. I dare say they will sell more pickups in eastern Europe than western too.
This whole reorganisation makes a lot of sense.
Ah, Automotive News provides us with the answer. Southampton will build all the Transit chassis-cab varients. No mention of Genk in this article either so i suppose it will continue on as is.
http://www.autonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20110614/ANE/110619949/1198
Hmmm… single sourcing, I think Henry I would approve.
Why is there three flags with stars in moons?
You may as well as why there’s four with crosses on them.
In Europe, there are way more than 5 flags with crosses, the scandinavians have 5, the balkans have a few, greeks; slovaks (or is it their neighbors?); swiss; liechtenstein; crosses out the ying-yang it seems…
Yes, but in this case you can only make out four of them.
Because they are ‘islamic nations’.
Btw, that part below Spain right there, that’s Africa.
This should save a lot of money on tooling and equipment costs.
You don’t need to have an MBA or a Ph.D. to come up with this totally obvious plan…
Robbie:
Actually, ya do.
Technically, Bill Ford Jr couldn’t have done this.
Shit, 4yrs ago he was still trying to figure out what to do with “Taurus” and Exploder.
Now theyve got 4 vehicles (Taurus, Explorer, Edge, Flex (and their Linc copies coming out of the same plant in Illinois)). With the Escape becoming a Kuga version (Tribute going away), and they now have a glaring hole in their smaller than Escape / Kuga lineup.
Ya actually DO have to have some engineering background, or a concept for how to put as many vehicles on as few platforms as possible.
This is about shuffling the production locations, I don’t think there are any new vehicles in play here. Currently some of the vehicles are produced at more than one factory, and some factories produce more than one platform.