Mahindra-Ford Joint Venture company will start producing Ford badged vehicles for export markets “aggressively”
The Vocal For Local campaign and the urge to produce products locally has never been more compelling and the automotive sector has certainly taken the task upon itself as a major challenge. Despite the health crisis, the local manufacturers have vowed to increase the dependency on local suppliers and the industry is definitely on a slow but steady path to recovery.
Mahindra & Mahindra, which has a vast passenger UV portfolio in the domestic market, is also relying on the exports for growth and according to a recent report emerged on the interweb, the Joint Venture company with American auto major Ford will begin producing Ford branded cars locally, for them to be shipped elsewhere for use in the global scenes.
Rajesh Jejurikar, Executive Director, Auto & Farm Sectors, Mahindra & Mahindra expressed his brand’s intentions to manufacture vehicles that can be used for the Mahindra-Ford JV by either using the platforms the “JV would have, which will be a carry over of Ford, adapted and so on and so forth.” He further explained that the two-pronged strategy would see exports “aggressively”.
The mutually beneficial partnership strengthened late last year when a JV company was announced and Mahindra will supply its petrol engines for use in Ford vehicles including the new 1.2-litre petrol engine for EcoSport from early next year reportedly. Both the companies have agreed to work on various field and take advantage of each other’s strengths in core areas.
The JV will give rise to a range of new SUVs into the near future. Firstly, a Ford branded C-segment SUV having plenty of commonalities with the next generation Mahindra XUV500, bound for early 2021, will likely arrive sometime next year. The partnership is said to spawn two SUVs for each brand that are developed for domestic and global markets.
A couple of B-segment SUVs are also expected to be in the pipeline. The one for Mahindra is said to sit below the upcoming XUV500 and the Ford C-SUV. The Mahindra project is internally codenamed the S204 while the Ford’s version is reportedly called the B745.