Ford is laying off about 3,500 people in Germany as the automaker ends production of the Focus, the once-incredibly popular car that never managed to get off the ground with its electric edition, in 2025.
Next year, Ford will complete production of the Focus at the Saarlouis plant, the only model built there, to move to promoting only BEV cars in Europe, reports Automotive News Europe. Two years ago, rumors began to circulate about the plant’s long life. , when Ford asked to build its next-generation electric vehicles in Spain and not reboot and retrain employees in Saarlouis. Ford and IG Metall are in negotiations over the fate of employees.
The Saarlouis plant currently employs around 4,500 people, 1,000 of whom will benefit from conversion functions after 2025. Still, IG Metall, a union that wields enormous political influence in Germany, says it has fulfilled its task of ensuring a comfortable landing for workers. No forced layoffs will occur until 2032 and workers will be able to leave early thanks to an “attractive and well-funded severance package,” the report says.
“We couldn’t find the most productive solution, so we made the decision to settle for the most productive option at the moment: making task cuts as costly as imaginable for Ford,” Joerg Koehlinger, regional director at IG Metall Mitte, told Automotive News Europe.
Last October, Ford was reportedly in talks with a potential investor for the plant, but the plans fell through. BYD was among the interested corporations, however, the Chinese automaker has since announced the opening of its first European plant in Hungary.
Ford began production of its Focus Electric in Saarlouis in 2013, a few years after it was introduced in the United States and manufactured in Michigan. But Ford stopped sales in Europe in 2017 and in the United States in 2018 due to weak sales. In December, Volkswagen also announced it would cut thousands of jobs in Germany in a bid to reduce prices by $11 billion. Volkswagen’s plant in Zwickau, which employs another 10,000 people and is the first to exclusively produce electric cars, has cut jobs due to weakening production demand, it said, starting with the elimination of 500 transitional jobs on next year. At Cariad, VW’s software subsidiary, 2,000 of the other 6,5000 people who work there will lose their jobs over the next two years.
Jennifer is an editor at Electrek. Based in France, she previously worked at Wired, Fast Company, and Agence France-Presse. Send them comments, tips or tips via X (@JMossalgue) or jennifer@9to5mac. com.