The Australian car industry has turned a new chapter, as hundreds of local Ford employees have worked to create a new car for China.
Ford unveiled the Escort at the Beijing motor show on Sunday, a new small sedan with a heavy Australian influence.
China’s drivers have different tastes to Australians, demanding more rear seat space and an austere design that differs from cars that sell well locally.
Dozens of Australian designers and engineers have been shuttling between Melbourne and Nanjing to put the finishing touches on a sedan that paves the way for the future of Ford’s Australian presence.
Trevor Worthington, Ford’s vice president of product development for the Asia Pacific, studied at Victoria’s Monash and RMIT universities after growing up in Benalla.
He says Ford’s Melbourne team play a vital role in Ford’s global future.
"We have a very competent team of people who have cut their teeth on multiple programs in multiple markets, [who] have got a history of doing things on time with quality,” he says.
"For the foreseeable future the team in Australia are the anchor for any new Asia-specific product that needs to happen.”
Australia’s once worked on just one car, the locally-built Falcon sedan, wagon and ute, but that has changed in recent years with the team branching out to work on products such as the Thai-built Ford Ranger ute and India-specific Ford Figo hatch.
Blue oval executives maintain that the brand’s “one Ford” policy, or one car for every country, remains in place despite exceptions such as the China-specific Escort.
The sheer size of China’s population, which buys almost 30 million cars each year, gives Ford the flexibility to engineer a model for one market, for a small car segment that sees more than six million sales a year, with Ford internally targeting 250,000 to 300,000 sales of its new model.
Australian expat Marin Burela is the president of the Changan Ford Automobile joint venture in China.
He says the car will be a hit.
"It will be successful," Burela says.
"We’re extremely confident that it’s the right car, for the right time, for the right customers.
"We are confident that we have found the sweet spot."
David Schoch, Ford’s Asia Pacific president, says Australia remains a key element of the brands strategies despite its decision to stop building cars here.
"We have no intention of turning off the lights in Australia,” he says, "we are turning off the manufacturing lights, you know that, that decision has been made. But we intend to remain in Australia.
“My intention is for the team to grow, we just won’t have a manufacturing footprint there anymore.”
