Ford aims to have 40 electric and hybrid car models in four years
The American car brand Ford has announced at the Detroit Auto Show that it wants to offer a total of 40 hybrid and fully electric cars by 2022. To achieve this, the manufacturer is making new investments.
Those investments amount to a total of $ 11 billion, the company announced, according to Reuters. Converted that is about 9 billion euros. That is more than double the amount the car manufacturer had mentioned in 2015 for investments in electric driving. At the time, Ford quoted an amount of $4.5 billion. Some of the cars will be manufactured in China and destined for that market, Reuters said.
According to Ford CEO Jim Hackett, the company wants to focus more on hybrid or electric cars and trucks instead of sedans and combustion engines. The share of fully electric cars is lower than the number of hybrids. Of the forty models, sixteen must be fully electric and the rest plug-in hybrids. Ford’s plan to focus more on electric cars is said to have taken shape in the months after Hackett replaced the company’s previous CEO, Mark Fields.
Many car manufacturers plan to significantly increase the share of electric cars sold. Toyota recently announced that it will release more than ten electric car models in the first years after 2020. The Japanese manufacturer wants to have sold more than 5.5 million cars with an electric motor by 2030 and that every Toyota or Lexus car will be available by 2025. is as an electric model or at least as a plug-in hybrid model. The Volkswagen Group wants to make an electric model of every existing car from 2030. Mercedes-Benz will do this from 2022. BMW wants to have sold half a million electric models by the end of next year.
Other manufacturers have more ambitious plans for selling electric cars. For example, the Swedish manufacturer Volvo previously indicated that from 2019 only cars with an electric motor will be made. Jaguar Land Rover will do the same as Volvo from 2020 onwards. Renault, Nissan and Mitsubishi previously announced in September that they would release twelve fully electric models until 2022.