Ford will import Focus from China instead

[Lambeau]

Bastards.

 

[bigja01cobra]

Outside of Toyota, Honda and few select foreign OEM's, there's no money to be made selling economy cars in the U.S.

Produce them wherever it's cheapest, dump them in fleet sales, and make your CAFE numbers. Try to lose the least amount of money as possible.

Smart move by Ford.

This...

Niche cars should be produced in the target market area. Regional manufacturing is taking over professional power tools and other consumer electronic markets. China is no longer the cheapest and best way to manufacture. The US, UK, UAE, Eastern Europe etc are quickly jumping into small scale manufacturing. Cheap semi automation that is easily replicatable and is highly flexible is becoming the norm.

China and Taiwan are very good at these things (mainly because they have cheaper and in most case more skilled engineers). We actually farm out the initial design of automation to the Far East just to bring it to the states perfected it, replicate it, and send it to 7 different facilities throughout the world.

Risk mitigation one facility goes down others are still producing. All the eggs in one basket is too dangerous, especially with the fragility of the world we live in now. Take out 1 production facility could cripple a company unless we do like I have mentioned above.

 

[ur bittn]

 

[SID297]

The Focus is not a huge seller in the US, but I bet Ford is planning on selling tons of them in China.