Ford starts the uphill climb to get its cars back to the number one spot

You could once set your watch by it. Coming into the end of every year, it would be announced that a Ford had, once again, been the best-selling car in Ireland. Since 1998, it was usually a Focus, but the Fiesta got its nose in front once or twice through the years. Before that it was the Escort.

When Ford celebrated its 100th birthday in 2003, it had sat consistently at the top of the Irish car market for a decade. Since then, everything has changed. Utterly. First the Volkswagen Golf knocked the Focus off its No 1 perch, and then the Golf was in turn usurped by the Hyundai Tucson and Toyota Corolla.

Ford models seemed to slip into something of a somnambulant torpor. They were almost always still good to drive, but they had lost the urgency of demand which they once enjoyed. The likes of Skoda, Hyundai, Kia and Toyota chipped, chipped, chipped away at Ford’s once-unassailable position. Today, there is not a single Ford model in the top 10 best-selling cars in Ireland.

While that result in 2021 and 2022 has at least as much to do with a shortness of supply, thanks to the continuing crisis in computer chips, it’s also because Ford just doesn’t have as many cars to sell as once it did. The Ka is long dead, and it was followed swiftly to the scrapheap by the C-Max MPV. The Mondeo, once a mainstay of Ireland’s roads, followed shortly after, and earlier this year it was confirmed that the mighty Focus would be no more after 2025. This past month, it’s been confirmed that the S-Max and Galaxy MPV will cease production in 2023, and the Fiesta – the Fiesta, for heaven’s sake! – will be done and dusted by the summer of next year.

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By then, the Ford model range will have shrunk to just the Puma, the Kuga, the Mustang Mach-E electric SUV, and a whole bunch of Transit-based commercial vehicles, plus the Ranger pickup. It seems like a calamitous collapse, and there were rumours swirling that Ford might finally pull out of the European market entirely.

That, at least, seems now unlikely. At an event in Ford’s development and design base at Dunton, in Essex, the Blue Oval has announced at least some of its plans for a revival. However, if you’re waiting for a return of truly affordable models, well, you’ll be waiting.

Well, maybe not affordable in an outright cash price sense, but there are plans to make buying – or leasing, to be more accurate – more affordable for many. Lisa Brankin, managing director of Ford UK & Ireland, told The Irish Times: “In the UK, 95 per cent of our retail buyers finance their car through a Ford Credit package, such as the Options PCP. So for those buyers, it’s less about the purchase price and more about what they pay by month. We haven’t been so strong on Options in Ireland, but it is a journey on which we’ve started. So I think affordability can look different in the future from where it is today.” Brankin also pointed out that the market for affordable small and compact hatchbacks is shrinking, so it’s not so much that Ford is abandoning those markets, as it is a case of Ford following where customers are leading.

Ford is also planning to dramatically overhaul its dealer set-ups, changing to an “agency” model, with more and more online purchases. Dealers would then be largely responsible for delivery and collection services, as well as aftercare, but it’s not a one-size fits all process. While the dealer network in the UK is likely to shrink in the coming years, Brankin said: “Ireland is quite a different market to the UK. You’ve got lots of small towns and cities, so I think that there’s a need for representation and footprint. The journey here will be different to that in the UK.”

Above all, Ford needs compelling new product if it is to tempt customers back to showrooms. While there is still some defensiveness within Ford that the likes of the Focus and Fiesta would be higher up the sales charts had the computer chip crisis not strangled their production (part of which was due to Ford’s decision to divert what chips it could get hold of to higher-profit models such as the Transit, Kuga and Puma), the fact is that renewal is most definitely overdue.

It is coming, but not for a few months yet. First up will be an electric version of the hugely popular Puma crossover, which will need a one-charge range of at least 400km if it’s to be competitive with rivals from the likes of Peugeot, Opel, Hyundai and Renault. That will probably mean a price tag north of €30,000 for the EV Puma, but that pill might be sweetened somewhat by potential improvements in the interior. It’s part of a rapid expansion of EV models which will see Ford go fully electric by 2030.

Most importantly, there’s the Focus replacement, which will be launched early next year, and go on sale before Christmas 2023. This will be a crossover electric model, and will use the MEB electric car platform which Ford is licensing from Volkswagen. However, Ford is going to great lengths to reassure that it won’t be merely a badge-engineered VW ID.4, but a true Ford product. “We’re treating Volkswagen as we would any supplier,” Amko Leenarts, Ford of Europe’s design director, told The Irish Times. The car is reputed to resurrect a classic Ford name, with bets already being taken on the likes of Cortina or Escort. By using the MEB architecture this new Ford should have a one-charge range of about 500km, and it will be built at Ford’s Cologne plant in Germany, which has just been the subject of a major refit and investment to switch it over to electric car construction.

Beyond that, Ford will introduce two more all-electric models: a slope-roofed “coupe” version of the new crossover, and a larger, more luxurious model.

Although Ford has this past month had to expensively shut down the Argo AI autonomous driving start-up in which it had heavily invested, advanced driver aids are still on the agenda. Next year, the Mustang Mach-E electric SUV will be updated with Ford’s BlueCruise system, which will – legislation permitting – allow drivers to drive hands-off, but eyes-on for extended stretches on main roads.

Ford is also betting hard on telematics and connected vehicles as a service which it can sell to customers. The system is already up and running in the UK, and has been partly activated in Ireland. In the Dunton technical centre, there’s a hushed, high-tech room with a vast screen displaying constantly adjusting numbers as Ford monitors the health of vehicles – mostly vans so far – whose owners have signed up to the scheme. The boast is that FORDLiive can knock as much as 10 days off the time it takes to repair a problem, mostly by careful monitoring of a vehicle’s systems to detect and deduce when those problems are likely to occur. The Liive set-up is also a way of fast-tracking parts sourcing and distribution, which also helps minimise the time off the road. Clearly, it’s a big data-crunching exercise, and that is its Achilles’ heel. Ford executives admit that private customers are reluctant to sign up for fears of having an electronic “Big Brother” in the cockpit.

The commercial vehicles side of the operation is effectively bankrolling Ford, but there’s more to it than just financial success. The idea is that the commercial vehicles team – especially the D-Ford “disruption” section, a team of designers and engineers whose task is to be a blue-sky thinking start-up within Ford – can take the lead on designing the sorts of digital and physical systems that can also appeal to private buyers. FORDLiive grew out of the commercials operation, as did the clever new steering wheel for the upcoming electric Transit Custom, which flips up flat to form a table so that you can enjoy lunch in the cab. Other D-Ford innovations include automating systems such as door locking and window winding, which it is reckoned can knock 20 seconds off each delivery for a service such as Amazon or DHL, potentially clawing back an hour each working day in saved time. It was left hanging in the air whether such delivery companies would allocate that extra hour to rest or break time, or just use it to squeeze in more deliveries, but that is outside Ford’s purview.

Although it is the van side of the operations – these days called Ford Pro – that has been bringing home the bacon, Lisa Brankin is firm that Ford is now not a van-making company which builds some passenger cars on the side. “It isn’t the case that we’re built just around vans at the moment,” she told The Irish Times. “What you’ve seen in passenger car sales has been driven by supply, and when we’re able to build stuff again, you’ll see there’s an opportunity to grow. As the availability of chips for our passenger cars returns, you’ll see that market improving for us.”

Ford has a very steep mountain to climb, both in Ireland and across Europe, if it is to regain its old number one spots. The climb officially starts here.