Rowley’s expanded role will include helping to cuts costs and to increase quality as part of Ford’s goal to find savings of $3 billion in global structural costs related to the internal combustion engine business.
Rowley will be focused “on benchmarking every aspect of our business,” Kumar Galhotra, president of Ford Blue, said on the analyst call.
“One of the big costs is our investments in products. Are they efficient? Are they world-class? If they are not, we need to take a bunch of investment out of there without compromising the product,” Galhotra said.
Ford’s European history
Ford of Europe was created in 1967 with the merger of Ford of Britain, Ford Germany and Ford’s Irish division. The combined division unified the development of models in Europe, which previously were carried separately in the UK and Germany.
In the future Ford’s European division will largely be split between the Ford Pro commercial division and Ford Model e, a company spokesman told Automotive News Europe.
Ford’s UK-based development center in Dunton near London focuses on commercial vehicles including vans and trucks. It will largely fall under Ford Pro, while Ford’s development operations in Cologne, Germany, are expected to work on electric vehicles under Model e.
The decision to organize the company into new divisions was to allow investors to see the “value creation” among each of the divisions, Lawler said. “We feel that we should get credit for that,” he said.
Legacy companies like Ford have recently been valued below newer EV-focused companies such as Tesla despite consistently producing better financial results.
The new restructuring would give Ford the ability to draw on the strengths of its manufacturing experience and combine it with those of an entrepreneurial start-up, Farley said.
“Model e will produce as much excitement as any pure EV competitor, but with the scale and the resources that no startup could ever match” he said. “We want to beat the old players. We want to beat the new players.”
