The C-segment Focus is only a mid-sized car but is a Really Big Thing for Ford. For a start, it is will be a talisman for Alan Mulally’s mission to cement his beloved ‘One Ford’. This is another car that can and will sell everywhere – a trick that so far has been pulled off only by Japanese and German car makers. Squaring the needs of Basildon and Houston in the same mainstream mid-sizer is a class act if you can pull it. Mullally goes further. The Focus will be on 120 markets worldwide.
Secondly, this is the car to beat in the UK market. Ford is the market leader and will only manage to feed its loyal dealers if it gets this car just so.
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Volume is not as great as for the Fiesta – that would be to overturn the natural order of things – but Ford of Britain sales director, John Wellsman, prefers to review Focus numbers as one piece with the lower-selling derivatives, C-Max and Kuga – the taller and SUV-ish Focus versions respectively and all off the same platform.
The Focus badge appears on five-door and estate-car versions. A three-door will arrive one day but there is a degree of secrecy about the plan. The guesswork says that it will be a coupe and will be the first new generation Focus to carry the RS badge.
Ford will have 20% of the C segment in the UK with that three car range and it will have very good economics. Worldwide there will be 2m units off this platform. It is the first time that Ford has done anything like that volume and the financial benefits will be immense… just what doctor Mulally ordered.
But the big question in the UK is: will Ford swell the numbers by selling to the daily rental fleets at massive discounts? There are players as we speak selling at 50% off list price to UK rapid churn fleets.
The answer, predictably, is a solemn no. Ford thinks it has expensive looking products coming through and wants expensive achieved prices from which will arise low monthly lease costs. That is the Holy Grail. Ford will watch nervously as Vauxhall picks up some of its share of rental fleet volumes.
This is no longer a commercial practice that is here today and swept aside tomorrow. Ford has lengthy chats with the forecasting guides like Glass and CAP. They outline their pricing strategies and the guides say “OK, if you promise, we can give you a 6% better three year, 36,000 mile residual value.” It’s in nobody’s interest for those gentlemanly compacts to perish but the main thing that goes wrong is the man at HQ saying – towards the end of the quarter – that the taps have to be turned back on.
The belief is that Mulally will not be such a man. He has a new focus.
