Back in June 2022, Ford announced that the Valencia Assembly plant in Spain would be retooled for the production of next-generation all-electric vehicles, though shortly thereafter, the automaker also announced that some of its planned investments in that area would be delayed as it worked to develop a new platform for the European market. Since then, it’s been a bit unclear what the Valencia plant will build in the future, as well as when it might receive a new product, and it seems as if nothing is set in stone today, a couple of years later.
“We’re going to bring something to Valencia, but we haven’t committed to what that’s going to be,” Marin Gjaja, chief operating officer of Ford Model E, told Autocar in a recent interview. “We’re still working on that. I think it’s going to be multi-energy. That’s our current thinking, because we think it gives us the best chance of success given the European market and where we are in adoption.”
This aligns with a report from March indicating that a hybrid SUV may be added to the assembly line in Valencia at some point in the future, which is notable as that plant only currently builds one product – the Kuga. Ford expects the Valencia plant to have a capacity of around 300k units annually at full scale, though the automaker also laid off over 1,000 workers at the facility recently, too.
These changes come in the wake of Ford’s decision to abandon its plan to transform its entire European passenger vehicle lineup to EVs by 2030, a plan that Gjaja recently admitted was simply “too ambitious.” In the meantime, the automaker is considering a variety of paths forward, including developing its own low-cost EV platform for the masses.
We’ll have more on the future of the Ford Valencia Assembly plant soon, so be sure and subscribe to Ford Authority for around-the-clock Ford news coverage.
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