One hundred years ago nearly half of the cars on British roads were Fords. Henry Ford opened his first dealership here in 1910. A year later he chose Trafford Park, Manchester, as the site of his first Model T factory outside the US. He built the first British cars before 1911 and by 1914 he was making cars there on a moving production line.  On that beginning Ford’s leading position in the UK car market was founded, along with the enduring notion that Ford is a British company. Although the Blue Oval no longer makes cars or vans here, it does make huge numbers of engines and employs 3000 engineers at its Dunton design and engineering centre. But over the past decade it has struggled to make profits in Europe and has been through several bouts of ‘right-sizing’, involving retrenchments and plant closures, without much improvement of the bottom line. Meanwhile, its all-American rival General Motors has sold up and departed Europe for good.  Given all this, and the unprecedented challenges car makers face over the next decade, we thought it right to visit Ford’s epicentre in Dearborn, Michigan, to meet the company’s leaders and learn their plans for the future, for Europe and for the UK. The following story reveals our findings. Darren Palmer: meet ‘Mr EV’  Darren Palmer remembers the moment his vision of electric cars changed. It drove him to leave a dream job launching exciting conventional cars to lead Ford’s headlong dash towards an entirely new kind of battery-propelled mobility.  “I was in charge of Mustang, Explorer and Lincoln’s performance models, and having a great time,” Palmer recalls. Then out of the blue he got the call. The new challenge, it turned out, was to become product development director of Ford’s Project Edison, a 70-strong cross-functional think-tank set up in a former hosiery factory in Detroit’s Corktown district to conceive a new range of high-performance EVs.  “I was unsure at first,” Palmer recalls. “For me, electric cars were more about sensible buying than the exciting cars I knew. Then Sherif Marakby, our autonomous vehicle CEO, said, ‘trust me this is going to be the next big development in cars’. When you know them, you’ll love them. And he was right.  “I just couldn’t believe how good these new cars were. They could do things you’d never do in an ICE (internal combustion-engined) car. They were just better.”  Such passion from Palmer, a tall, fast-talking Englishman who has spent much of his 28-year Ford career on the fast-track, is all the more powerful for the fact that this is the man who delivered Ford’s much-loved Fiesta ST200, a skunkworks pocket-rocket universally admired. He also delivered the Mustang to Europe, proudly watching it become the world’s best-selling sports car. He’s a car lover since childhood, so when he starts talking about this new strain of EVs being “sexy and emotional”, you need to listen.  The big plan, first publicised by Ford around 18 months ago and expanded since, is to spend $11 billion on a cycle of exciting EVs beginning next year. Under the deal recently agreed with Volkswagen, Fords built on the MEB platform will kick in from 2023. The flow will start next year with a ‘Mustang-based crossover’. The name Mach One was floated early on, although it has since emerged that it will be called the Mach E. A battery Ford F150 will come before 2022, says Palmer, and a fully electric Transit. Palmer won’t confirm that a Ranger or Bronco (the famous compact 4×4 that’s returning with conventional power after disappearing in the mid-1990s) are in the BEV mix, but he doesn’t deny it either.  “We’re hitting our biggest icons first,” he says, “but we have more. And we’ll keep working through them.” Meanwhile, starting now, Ford is launching a new or renewed supporting range of smaller plug-in hybrids, first being the Escape SUV (our Kuga) with a larger Explorer not far behind, although it isn’t currently planned for the UK.  Project Edison grew out of an earlier plan to build a second generation of the decent but dull economy BEVs, such as a second-generation electric Focus. But the decision to stop making saloons in the US, along with a realisation that the way to sell new BEVs at a profit was to build exciting cars closely related to existing icons, brought a new philosophy. “We decided very carefully where we’d play in the electric car market, and that every one would amplify the characteristics of the model it was based on. Each one had to be extremely desirable, but at an attainable price,” says Palmer.  “These cars won’t necessarily be cheap, but they’ll be gotta-have-it models, sold at a price we judge is attainable for our existing customers. They’re our focus. Ford has always democratised technology and this will be more of the same. But early adopters of BEVs have a lot to deal with, so Project Edison is working on every aspect of ownership, from the minute someone considers an electric car, through the whole
Origin: Exclusive: the future of Ford, according to its bosses