Ford’s Brazilian line-up, 2021. Once upon a time, there were locally developed Corcels and Mavericks; even the EcoSport was a Brazilian development. Today, it’s Mustang, a couple of trucks, and a rebadged Chinese crossover.
We heard a lot about the demise of Holden as GM retreats from continents at a time, seemingly in a quest to be a Sino-American player rather than a global one. Weâve heard less about Ford shrinking as well, though the phenomenon is similar.
Fordâs Brazilian range is now the Mustang, Ranger, Territory (which is fundamentally a badge-engineered Yusheng S330 from China with a Fordized interior), and Bronco. Itâs beating a retreat from Brazil, at the cost of tens of thousands of jobs (its own, plus associated industriesâ) in a country that already has 15 per cent unemployment.
Their reasoning is that electrification and technological change are driving restructuring, which seems plausible, till you realize that in other markets, including Thailand where thereâs still a plant making Fords, the company is fielding essentially trucks, the truck-based Everest, and the Mustang.
Ford warned us that this would be its course of action a few years ago, but now itâs happening, it makes even less sense.
Say itâs all about (eventual) electrification. Youâd want vehicles in your portfolio now that lend themselves to energy efficiency, so that people begin associating your brand with it. Trucks and pony cars donât fit with this long-term. And I still believe that at some point, even before trucks commonly have electric powertrains, someone is going to say, âThese tall bodies with massive frontal areas are using up way more of the juice Iâm paying for. We donât need something this big.â
Letâs say Ford quickly pivots. It sticks a conventional saloon body on the Mustang Mach-E platform (which, letâs be honest, started off as a Focus crossoverâthe product code, CX727, tells us as much) in record time. Would anyone buy it? Probably not before they see what the Asians, who donât abandon segments because they canât be bothered working hard, have in their showrooms. Toyota, Honda, Hyundai, Mazda, and countless Chinese marques, have been building their goodwill in the meantime.
Itâs why two decades ago, I warned against DaimlerChrysler killing off its price-leading brand, Plymouth. You never know when recessionary times come and you want an entry-level brand. Before the decade was out, that time came, and Chrysler didnât have much it could use without diluting its existing brandsâ market perceptions to have some price leaders.
Ford retreating from B- and C-segment family cars, even CD- and E-segment ones, means itâll find it difficult to get back into those markets later on. A good example would be the French, who donât find much success in the large saloon market generally, and would find it very hard to re-enter in a lot of places.
I realize the action isnât in regular passenger cars these days, but the fact that Fiat, Chevrolet and Volkswagen still manage to field broad lines in Brazil suggests that the market still exists and they can still eke out some money from their sales.
Itâs as though the US car firms are giving up, ceding territory. And on this note, Ford has form.
In the 1990s, Fordâs US arm under-marketed the Contour and Mystique Stateside, cars based on the original European Mondeo. I saw precious little advertising for them in US motoring press. As far as I can tell, they wanted to bury it because they didnât like the fact it wasnât developed by them, but by Fordâs German-based team in Köln. âSee, told you those Europeans wouldnât know how to engineer a CD-segment car for the US.â The fiefdom in Dearborn got its own way and later developed the Mazda-based Fusion, while the Europeans did two more generations of Mondeo.
In the 2000s, it decided to flush the goodwill of the Taurus name down the toilet, before then-new CEO Alan Mulally saw what was happening and hurriedly renamed the Five Hundred to Taurus.
It under-marketed the last generation of Falconâyou seldom saw them on forecourtsâand that looked like a pretext for closing the Australian plant (âSee, no one wants big carsâ) even though by this point the Falcon was smaller than the Mondeo in most measures other than overall length, and plenty of people were buying similarly sized rear-wheel-drive saloons over at BMW and Mercedes-Benz.
The Mondeo hybrid has been another model that you barely hear of, even though the Fusion Hybrid, the American version of the car, had been on sale years before.
Think about what they gave up. Here, Ford once owned the taxi market. It doesnât any more as cabbies ultimately wound up in Priuses and Camrys. Had Ford fielded a big hybrid saloon earlier, Toyota might not have made inroads into the taxi market to the same extent. Ford almost seems apologetic for being in segments where others come to, and when challenging the market leaders, doesnât put much effort in any more.
Objectively, I would rather have a Mondeo Hybrid than a Camry, but good luck seeing one in a Ford showroom.
Maybe Fordâs smart to be putting all its resources into growth areas like trucks and crossovers. Puma and Escape have appeal in the B- and C-segment crossover markets in places like New Zealand. Theyâre fairly car-like now, too. But to me thatâs putting all your eggs into one basket. In countries like Brazil and Thailand, where Ford doesnât sell well resolved crossovers in these segments, itâs treading a fine line. I look at the market leadership it once had in cars, in so many places, and in 2021 that looks like a thing of the past. Moreâs the pity.