Ford plans product blitz

DETROIT — Ford Motor Co.'s product development direction has taken a drastic turn under new CEO Jim Hackett.No longer is the automaker content to compete in segments where it can't win, even if that means sacrificing a relatively popular vehicle that brings in more than 200,000 sales a year, as in the case of the Fusion sedan, which will leave the U.S. by early next decade. And it wants to further capitalize on the strengths of its best-selling F-series pickups and Transit vans while expanding its utility lineup to include fun off-roaders and more performance-oriented crossovers.By 2020, Ford expects 86 percent of its volume will come from pickups, SUVs and commercial vehicles.Its Lincoln luxury brand is taking a similar tone, placing more of an emphasis on utilities, including the Nautilus, Aviator and Navigator, as it continues the climb back to relevancy.The brands' biggest problem in recent years has been a dearth of new product. The Escape and Explorer crossovers, while popular, have grown stale. They'll both be redesigned by the end of next year. Ford is — finally — reintroducing the Ranger midsize pickup, in early 2019, and the much-hyped Bronco will bow in 2020.A Mustang-inspired battery-electric crossover, Ford's answer to Tesla and the Chevrolet Bolt, also will debut in 2020.By then, Ford Motor expects to have the freshest showroom in the industry, with an average vehicle age of 3.3 years."The freshness is really important from a business standpoint, but where we compete is what you're seeing Ford bet on," Jim Farley, Ford's president of global markets, said this year. "We don't just want to be in the generic SUV business. We want to be in the performance business, or the high-speed off-road business."RELATED CONTENT Future Product: Ford and Lincoln timeline Future Product PipelineAll of those new vehicles will fall under one of five modular architectures: rear-wheel-drive/all-wheel-drive body-on-frame; front-wheel-drive/awd unibody; commercial van unibody; rwd/awd unibody; and a unibody platform for battery-electric vehicles.Its product renaissance will include a slew of new hybrids and EVs. The automaker plans 40 electrified vehicles by 2022 as it invests $11 billion in the technology."We've been working hard as a team to imagine the future, and it has a number of dimensions to it," Hackett said. "There's a lot of things happening now in terms of the fitness of the company, and these products are coming relatively soon."

Ford plans product blitz

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