The Ford Focus, the family car that epitomised the company’s 1990s renaissance and became a byword for fun-to-drive family cars, will be killed off in 2025, a casualty of Ford’s shift towards an electrified lineup.
The news came with Ford’s announcement that it will end car production at its Saarlouis, Germany, factory where the Focus is currently produced. Saarlouis was in the running to manufacture Ford’s next generation of electric vehicles, but lost out to the firm’s Valencia plant in Spain.
“We do not have in our planning cycle an additional model that goes into Saarlouis,” Ford of Europe Chairman Stuart Rowley told reporters, adding that Ford was investigating “other opportunities” for the plant that include selling it to another carmaker.
Clearly that will mean job losses in Germany, though it’s conceivable that’s some workers could be transferred to Ford’s other German plant in Cologne, which is scheduled to begin production of a new crossover based on VW’s MEB electric architecture in 2023. Automotive News reports that 4,600 people are currently employed in Saarlouis.
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But Ford has warned that Valencia can also expect its head count to fall, despite winning the contract for Ford’s next-gen electric cars. Around 6,000 people work at the Spanish plant where the Kuga crossover, S-Max and Galaxy minivans and the Transit Connect are manufactured. The D-segment Mondeo was also built there until recently, Ford dropping its once popular family saloon and estate in spring 2022 in response to falling sales as buyers switched to crossovers.
The Mondeo badge had been a regular fixture in European Ford showrooms for almost 30 years, but ford has proved time and again that it’s not sentimental. The company ditched the three-decade-old Escort name in 1998 when it introduced its replacement, choosing Focus instead to underline what a radical shift it represented over what had gone before.
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