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Despite the fact that the Spanish automobile industry celebrates the award of the new GE-2 electric platform, which will be the basis for Ford’s electric models in Europe, its CEO, Stuart Rowley was adamant in the video statement confirming the news: “This decision does not mean that a specific new product will be built in Europe.”
“A lot of work remains to obtain approval to build an electric car in Valencia,” he stated, stressing that the urgent need in the short term was to “focus on production in the short term and meet the 2022 objectives, which will finance the industrial transition of Almussafes ».
In just over a year, only one model, the Kuga, will come out of the Valencian assembly lines, and, given that the electric vehicle requires less labor than the thermal one, it is expected that the workforce at the Levantine plant will be reduced .
From UGT, the majority trade union center, they are aware and in their own statement they point out that “it will be necessary to negotiate how and when the transformation is carried out and what volume of employment will be required in the future and how the workforce will be resized “.
The Director of Manufacturing at Ford Spain, Dionisio Campos, echoed this position: “There is a lot of work to be done to ensure the financial viability that allows us to produce EVs based on the new GE-2 architecture. We have to define the necessary steps for an effective transition to the electric car industrial model.”
That Almussafes will turn out to be more viable than the German plant in Saarlouis plunges the latter into uncertainty. Rowley himself stressed that there are still three years of production left in it and that a working group has already been formed to coordinate the factory with the Saarland Government and the unions to “develop future opportunities in the locality.”
For now, the immediate response of labor representatives in Germany has been to demonstrate outside the plant. “We will never accept this result,” said the chairman of the Saarlouis Works Council, Markus Thal. The process has been described by the parliamentary representative Anke Rehlinger as “indecent and sloppy”.
From Avia, the Valencian automotive cluster, Ford’s decision has been described, in the words of its president, Mónica Alegre, as “an oxygen balloon for the regional industry, which has become a reference territory in electric mobility, as well as as a technology investment pole.
Union sources indicate that the proximity of the Volkswagen Group battery gigafactory in Sagunto, 62 km from Almussafes, was an element that repeatedly arose in the negotiations – a factor that underlines the cluster as a differential factor. However, the first generation of accumulators to come out of Sagunto in 2025 will not, a priori, be compatible with Ford’s GE-2 platform technology.
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