Ford To Lay Off Workers In Move Toward EVs

Meanwhile, it’s taking a victory lap on collaborating with the Chinese for a battery plant.

Ford Motor Co.’s Europe operations will slash 3,800 jobs to free up resources for electric cars, according to a report from The Detroit News. Fears that this would be the eventuality of pushing EVs so hard in the industry now don’t seem unfounded as they might have a few years ago.

See the Los Angeles Tesla road rager recently arrested here.

The official announcement from Ford says the move is to accommodate “rapidly changing market conditions” as competition heats up in the EV niche. Those 2,800 jobs won’t be slashed immediately but instead will be eliminated by 2025.

Engineering jobs are apparently front and center on the chopping block. About 1,700 positions in Germany will be eliminated, 1,000 in the UK, and 100 elsewhere in Europe. Around 3,400 engineering jobs will be preserved on the continent. As for the additional 1,000 jobs to be cut, around 1,000 will be administrative, marketing, sales, and distribution positions – 600 in Germany, 300 in the UK, and 100 in other European countries.

At the same time, Ford is patting itself on the back for a planned battery manufacturing facility planned for Marshall, Michigan. Europe might be seeing red after this announcement, in part because manufacturing jobs have been flowing to the other side of the pond. Others are seeing red because this venture is being done in collaboration with Chinese firm CATL.

With tensions on the rise between the US and China, now might not seem like the best time to be working with companies beholden to an authoritarian communist government that’s made its intentions quite clear.

Not only is Ford doing a victory lap with this announcement, so is Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer and many media outlets. To them, the future of the auto industry is electric and anyone who questions that utopian plan is anti-progress, a point they’ve thrown in the face of Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin after he rejected the prospect of bringing in a partly Chinese-controlled plant to his state, calling it a “Trojan horse.”

Partnering with CATL isn’t anything new. Ford announced last year it was working with the Chinese company to start using its LFP batteries in specific Mach-E crossovers and the F-150 Lightning for Europe and North America.

Sources: The Detroit News, Bloomberg, The Detroit News

Images via Ford