Ford's chairman of the board in Germany, Gunnar Herrmann, is now reaching out to his own bosses on the other side of the Atlantic because Ford is cutting back on its electric car ambitions.
– If you believe in prosperity, growth and the future, we should keep the electric car targets as they are, says Gunnar Herrmann.
Herrmann is chairman of the board of Ford in Germany. And the 65-year-old former country manager for i.a. Germany and Portugal are certainly not happy that other higher ups than him have decided that he must also sell cars with internal combustion engines after 2030.
Herrmann is otherwise at the head of an organization that can only watch while the money disappears, because at the moment it is more than difficult to make money on electric cars. In fact, Ford loses 1 million kroner on each and every electric car they build on the assembly line.
Most recently, this week it was announced that Ford is therefore scaling back its ambitions when it comes to electric cars. This means, among other things, that a large, seven-seater SUV, which was already delayed, will be dropped entirely.
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So do the brand's plans to exclusively sell electric cars in Europe in 2030. But according to Herrmann, that does not change the fact that it is wrong to change the ambition to only make electric cars.
In an interview with Frankfurter Rundschau , however, the board chairman does not only reach out for decisions within his own ranks. He says frankly that car brands that stick to the internal combustion engine risk failure. And then he gives part of the blame to EU politicians.
– Their demands can only be justified by the fact that they lacked a functioning strategy, or that they constantly hoped and prayed to God that they would be allowed to continue, as we did for them, Gunnar Herrmann tells the newspaper.
Gunnar Herrmann is, however, raising his salary at a company that generally has a hard time with electric cars. In the course of 2023 alone, 5,000 layoffs of Ford employees in England, Germany and Spain could be directly related to the arrival of electric cars.
At the same time, Ford can watch while interest in electric cars now collapses for the 7th month in a row in their most important market – namely Germany. The Germans immediately lost interest in the type of car when the country's government removed the state subsidy. Read more about it here .
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