According to the company, the factory in Cologne, Germany, will be refurbished to produce the first motor-built, fully-electric passenger vehicle from the American manufacturer in America.
Ford has said that by 2026, all the passenger vehicles it sells in Europe will be fully electric or built-in hybrid vehicles, which will have an internal combustion engine as well as a battery and electric motor. It is said that by 2030 it will have to have its European passenger vehicles fully electric.
“We have successfully restructured Ford of Europe and returned to profitability in the fourth quarter of 2020,” said Stuart Rowley, President of Ford of Europe. “Now we are loading an electric future into Europe.”
Ford announced earlier this month that it would invest at least $ 22 billion globally by 2025 to build electric vehicles, almost twice what the company had previously committed to spend.
Europe has imposed aggressive targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by vehicles, and carmakers face huge potential fines if they do not comply. It helped the continent adapt to electric vehicles ahead of the United States.
About 10% of the car industry in Europe was purely electric in December, Ford CEO Jim Farley said during a recent conference call. Electric vehicles accounted for 54% of car sales in Norway last year, the first country to have more than half of its car sales are vehicles with batteries.
Ford (F) will catch up to do. German carmaker Volkswagen (VLKAF), which announced an alliance with Ford in 2019, is the leader in the sale of electric vehicles in Europe. Global electric motor leader Tesla (TSLA) is building its first European factory outside Berlin, which opens later this year.
Ford has just started delivering the Mustang Mach-E electric vehicle in the United States and currently has no pure electric vehicles for sale in Europe. But the Mach-E will soon be available in European showrooms and Ford has more electric vehicles in the pipeline, including the E-Transit van, which will be in US dealers late this year and in Europe in early 2022. The E-Transit will be especially important for Ford. Despite having only 7% of European sales, it is is a leader in the sale of commercial vehicles in Europe.
But Ford only predicts that two-thirds of its commercial vehicle sales will be completely electric by 2030, rather than the 100% target it set for passenger vehicles.
Virtually all automakers are putting great pressure to switch from traditional cars with internal combustion engines to pure electricity, both to comply with increasingly stringent environmental regulations around the world and to meet the growing appetite for electricity among car buyers. General Motors (GM) recently announced that by 2035 it wants to sell only emission-free vehicles.
It is also expected that the electric vehicles will eventually be manufactured cheaper than traditional petrol-powered cars, due to less moving parts and therefore less labor required to assemble them. Ford estimates in 2017 that it needs 30% less labor to build electric vehicles as petrol-powered cars.
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