250,000 electric cars per year
Cologne Ford plant now relies on e-mobility
6/12/2023 5:53 p.m
For years there has been a mood of crisis in the Ford plants in Germany. The group is now opening its first electric car plant in Europe in Cologne. “This facility will be one of the most efficient and environmentally friendly in the entire industry,” said Bill Ford, Chairman of the Board. The Chancellor also praised it.
Ford wants to produce 250,000 electric cars a year in Cologne. The US carmaker announced this on the occasion of the plant opening. The all-electric Explorer based on the MEB electric platform developed by Volkswagen is scheduled to roll off the production line this year in the production facility at the Ford factory in the Niehl district, which has been converted into a European center for electric cars at a cost of around two billion euros. A second electric car will follow next year. Full capacity utilization should be achieved when production ramps up.
“This plant will be one of the most efficient and environmentally friendly in the entire industry,” said Chairman of the Supervisory Board Bill Ford. At the opening, Chancellor Olaf Scholz praised the plant as Ford’s commitment to e-mobility and Germany as a business location. Man-made climate change is one of the greatest challenges of the present. That is why the states had agreed to become climate-neutral by 2045. This is also the reason why the world is saying goodbye to the internal combustion engine. “We are concentrating on something new, something better, on clean mobility.”
The factory has state-of-the-art production technology, which also uses self-learning machines and autonomous transport systems and enables the management of large amounts of data in real time. The goal is CO2-neutral production. According to earlier information, the Americans want to sell more than 600,000 fully electric vehicles a year in Europe by 2026 and switch the vehicle range completely to electric models from 2030. The Cologne plant will be Ford’s first electric car plant in Europe.
The European business is the largest construction site of the US group. In the coming years, almost 4,000 jobs are to be lost in Germany because fewer workers are required to build electric cars and the development of combustion engines will be phased out in the foreseeable future. The second largest US carmaker has been in Germany for almost 100 years. In August 1925, the Ford Motor Company was entered in the German commercial register for the first time. The Cologne vehicle factory started work in June 1931 and relied heavily on German engineering.
The plant in Saarlouis followed in 1970, where the compact Focus model is currently still assembled. It is scheduled to be discontinued in 2025. The plant in Cologne has already undergone a massive downsizing. Most recently, 14,000 people worked for Ford in the cathedral city, three years ago there were still a good 18,000. Last year around 84,000 Fiestas rolled off the assembly line in Cologne. Before the Corona crisis, there were 244,000 vehicles.