Exclusive: Ford boss gives full details of Europe transformation plan

From the window of his office in Ford’s imperious mid-century-style European headquarters, Sander can look out across the company’s sprawling Cologne factory, where in just three months’ time the final Fiesta will roll down the line to make way for the Explorer, bringing to an end nearly half a century of production of the all-conquering supermini across eight generations – a particularly poignant symbol of just how drastically Ford is rethinking its product offering. 

“It’s sad, because owners have great memories,” muses Sander, acknowledging the tidal wave of social media dissent that met the official announcement of the Fiesta’s demise. “It was a tremendously successful vehicle over so many years. But if you want to grab something new firmly with both hands, you also have to be willing to let something go.” 

The ‘something new’ that Sander wants to grab is a slice of the expanding EV-flavoured pie that is comparable in terms of its profitability and significance to the slice Ford used to hold of the now-staling ICE car segment.

For a long time, Ford’s commercial vehicle business, fronted by the indomitable Transit, has been a much more lucrative operation than its passenger car business in Europe, and the onset of EVs gives the company a good opportunity to redress the balance, albeit with a much slimmer portfolio of cars and, initially at least, with the assistance of VW, its biggest rival – a critical component of the firm’s ongoing viability in this market. 

“We have to electrify everything, and Ford can’t do everything at the same time,” explains Sander. “This is why, if we didn’t have the co-operation with Volkswagen, we wouldn’t have an electric volume [selling] vehicle in the market in Europe right now. A few years later, possibly, but not now. So speed to market is clearly the key argument to go for a partnership strategy.”

The larger Mustang Mach-E, based on a bespoke Ford platform, has been “tremendously successful” since its 2021 arrival, accounting for the bulk of the firm’s 25,000 EV sales in Europe last year. 

“But the market is too small, so you don’t see enough on roads,” says Sander. “The Explorer will be very different: it’s in the core of the market, [so] it will get very high visibility just a couple of weeks after launch.”

Indeed, Ford plans for the Explorer and its second MEB-based EV to achieve comparatively colossal sales volumes of 600,000 over the next three years.

Simply swapping the Fiesta – with its razor-thin margins and hard-to-electrify platform – for the vastly more expensive and much larger Explorer isn’t the only piece of the commercial viability puzzle, which is why Ford is revamping every conceivable aspect of its European operations in a bid to stabilise its footing near the summit of the car sales charts.

That begins – counterintuitively, it might seem – with Ford taking the axe to its long-established car line-up. The Fiesta and Focus aren’t the only stalwarts bowing out: so too are there no replacements for the Mondeo, S-Max, Galaxy and Ecosport waiting in the wings. The future for Ford is all about playing to its strengths in arenas where its brand values stand it in good stead or it can lean on another brand’s hardware to help it get there. 

“We aren’t going to enter a segment just to be there, just because of competitors who have a totally different industrial footprint and totally different structures,” vows Sander. “We’re going to be much more picky when it comes to deciding where we’re going to play and where we want to be in order to build a profitable business. Because at the end of the day, we’re a business. We have to make sure that we make money.”

This strategy was first alluded to in 2019, when Ford pledged to usher in a “more targeted” lineup as part of a global cost-cutting programme aimed at boosting its competitiveness and stability – not just in Europe but worldwide – as it electrified.

As part of this shift in priorities, the Puma will become Ford’s smallest dedicated car and the low-volume Mustang coupé/convertible the only non-SUV in its car line-up – a similar approach to that taken in the US, where the firm long ago pledged that “almost 90% of the Ford portfolio in North America will be trucks, utilities and commercial vehicles” by 2020.

And how best to replicate Ford’s Stateside success? For the brand to be more American, obviously. It’s an approach that it has toyed with tentatively in the post ‘world car’ era, sending the Mustang to the UK in 2016 with its steering wheel on the right for the first time.

“We see how attractive our very iconic products are in Europe,” says Sander. “The Ranger [pick-up] is by far a market leader in Europe and the Mustang has a huge following, so we know the products which are most true to the DNA of our brand are successful in the European market. And in general, Europeans have a very positive attitude about America. The freedom, the entrepreneurship – all these American values in general resonate with European consumers.”

This doesn’t necessarily mean, stresses Sander, that each of Ford’s successful US models – among them the Bronco 4x4, the more road-biased Bronco Sport and the unstoppable F-150 pick-up – are in line to be exported in any great volumes across the Atlantic, but it does herald the advent of a more American-flavoured approach to Ford’s brand presentation.

And let it not be forgotten, Sander emphasises, that as well as being steeped in Motown heritage, Ford remains a “family-run company”, with Henry’s great-grandson Bill serving as executive chairman and his great-great-granddaughter Elena appointed as chief customer experience officer in 2018.

“From a technical and product substance perspective, I’m deeply convinced that we have everything we need in order to compete in the future,” says Sander. “But this isn’t enough. We need this emotional appeal, this huge value this brand can bring to the market, where possibly we have a little bit punched under our weight and can improve the way consumers perceive our brand significantly.”

With a new line-up on the way, a “right-sized” workforce in place and an adjusted factory network to accommodate both (Cologne is being rebuilt as an EV hub, Saarlouis will no longer build cars and Turkey’s Ford Otosan now owns the Puma factory in Romania), Ford of Europe is now turning its attention to the next part of the process: selling these cars to customers old and new.

The importance of getting these mechanisms right can’t be overstated. Even before Ford had announced the Fiesta’s retirement, the supermini had long since conceded top spot in the UK sales charts to the Vauxhall Corsa, and the profit margins on it were so slim that Ford was reportedly making more money from Lego model royalties.

Ford has been Europe’s leading van maker for the past eight years, and it’s well publicised that the UK’s favourite vehicle for the past two years running has been the Transit Custom (clocking nearly 43,000 sales in 2022 to nose just ahead of the Nissan Qashqai). But as Sander puts it: “The passenger vehicle business on its own has to be profitable. We can’t rely on a profitable commercial vehicle business in order to run the passenger car business as a kind of side business or as a hobby.”

That’s why, in another landmark corporate shift, Ford will transition to the agency retail model in Europe over the coming years, enabling it to take complete control of the sales process and promote its new messaging more effectively. 

“What we definitely can improve on is consistency: consistency in our positioning, consistency in our messaging across everything we do,” explains Sander. “Not only a bit here and there but across everything we do: point of sale, product, marketing materials, short-term and long-term product strategy… Consistency: that’s what we have to build on.” 

As with Ford’s model line-up and factory network, there will be downsizing here too, with a number of European dealerships shutting down. Sander refused to say how many but said a “profitable number” will remain. Ford remains the brand with the most dealerships in the UK (its biggest European market) but has previously said that it aims to reduce its network from nearly 400 sites to between 210 and 230 by 2025, which could nudge it below Vauxhall. 

This ties into the prevailing focus on rationalisation aimed at securing Ford’s future in Europe. 

Farley said recently that Ford “should have done much better” in 2022 as it posted full-year losses of $2 billion (£1.6bn). By narrowing its line-up, reducing its headcount and modernising its dealership network, Ford intends to make Europe a viable marketplace where it can do just that.