In Europe, many automakers have faced their fair share of struggles lately amid rapid inflation and slower-than-expected demand growth for all-electric vehicles, which isn’t ideal given the fact that many of those companies invested tremendous amounts of money in electrification. As such, we’ve seen multiple automakers implement cost-cutting measures as of late in an effort to right the financial ship, moves that include shuttering factories, delaying or canceling certain future models, and laying off workers. Now, Ford continues its own ongoing European strategy shift in a number of ways.
Ford plans to reduce its European workforce by 4,000 employees by the end of 2027, for starters, with most of the cuts occurring in Germany and the UK. The Blue Oval is also making additional changes to Ford Explorer EV and Capri production that will result in the addition of more short-time days at the Cologne Electric Vehicle Center in Germany starting in Q1 2025. As Ford Authority recently reported, the automaker had already scaled back production of both of those EV crossovers for the remainder of 2024 amid weak demand.
Along with soft demand for the Explorer EV and Capri, Ford noted that its passenger vehicle business in Europe is suffering, leading to significant losses, while the arrival of new competitors has also been “highly disruptive” to its business in that region. As such, these restructuring plans aim “to create a more cost-competitive structure and ensure the long-term sustainability and growth of its business in Europe,” according to the automaker.
The proverbial writing has been on the wall for some time now, as Ford previously trimmed 1,000 positions from its Valencia Assembly plant in Spain, and has also pared down its management team in Europe, all while announcing that more cuts were coming this year. Of course, Ford isn’t the only automaker in the midst of trimming jobs, as GM just laid off around 1,000 workers, and Nissan plans to cut upwards of 9,000 positions globally, too.
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It comes as no surprise to those who understand the economic forces at play here. Post Covid, many of not most companies added margin to their profits and hoping that consumers wouldn’t notice or if they did, would just say that it’s inflation. Most in the know figured out that real inflation was much less than what they were experiencing in the marketplace. When consumers starting curtailing purchases, the only other option was to starting cutting back on operations.
One has to just laugh when big corporations ignore what people really want. Only a minority want or are interested in EVs.
But they invested a lot believing that they would have guaranteed success based on what??? Seriously, I’ve never seen management more emotional than that of automakers… it’s a good thing they’re not bankers because as naive as they seem, they could lend the institution’s entire capital to someone just because they promised overvaluation in return, without any guarantee of this… total nonsense!
Isn’t virtue signalling by incompetent upper management and mandates by dumb ass politicians wonderful?
But the automaker’s management is also doing everything to overcome failure: reducing diversity by focusing on a single segment and body (if it weren’t for its native market, the brand would now be in trouble)… the stupid greed of automakers is something that It’s incredibly difficult to assimilate… it seems like they have no idea that the market can change or that any factor can influence negatively, as if they were not capable of reasoning, being blinded by the illusion of certain profits… as if they haven’t yet gone bankrupt, which must be the most surprising at the end!
And in addition to having reduced the options, it still seems that to save time they decided to cut back on quality because even before launching products they needed recalls… this Explorer Ev, for example, could have been launched at the time of the Ev boom… now it would even be affected in sales but at least it could present greater resistance as it was already recognized in the market… and since they saw that sales would be affected they could quickly come up with alternatives, like Stellantis which presented its Avenger representative as Ev but hybrid versions were soon added… both Explorer and Capri should already have a hybrid option… Ford lacks some coherence and quick reasoning, so it doesn’t end up being the last one on the market in action!
ramble much?
We are definitely in another Malaise Era in this industry
They’re too stupid (or stoned) to substitute ICEs and hybrids in EVs place. And arrogant too.