Company type | Subsidiary |
---|---|
Industry | Automotive |
Founded | August 18, 1925 |
Founder | Henry Ford |
Headquarters | , Germany |
Number of locations | Two manufacturing facilities |
Key people | |
Products | Automobiles |
Number of employees | 28,842 (2009) |
Parent | Ford of Europe |
Website | ford.de |
Ford-Werke GmbH [1] is a German-based car manufacturing company headquartered in Merkenich-Cologne, North Rhine-Westphalia. It is a fully-owned subsidiary of American Ford Motor Company. It operates two large manufacturing facilities in Germany, a plant in Cologne and a plant in Saarlouis, and serves as a major hub for Ford's presence in the European markets.
The earliest presence of the Ford Motor Company in Germany was a parts operation set up in Hamburg in 1912.[ citation needed ] [2]
At the end of 1924 the US Ford Motor Company established a sales office in Berlin which at the start of 1925 received a permit to import 1,000 tractors. In 1920 the government had imposed a tariff so high that it amounted to a prohibition against importing foreign automobiles, but this was reversed in October 1925. The move had evidently been anticipated by Ford, since on 18 August 1925 the Ford Motor Company Aktiengesellschaft had been entered in the Berlin Companies Register. [3]
During 1925 an assembly plant was constructed in a rented warehouse in the Westhafen (western port) district of Berlin, which was well located for receiving deliveries of kits and components via the country's canal network. On 1 April 1926 the first German assembled Model T was produced, using imported parts. [4] The Berlin assembly operation produced 1,177 Model Ts in 1926 and a further 2,594 during 1927 which was the Model T's final year: in August 1927 Model T production in Berlin ended, and it was nearly a year until, on 20 August 1928, Ford auto-production in Berlin recommenced, now of the Ford Model A. [3]
In March 1929 General Motors purchased a controlling 80% holding in Opel. Henry Ford's reaction was a prompt decision to build a complete Ford auto-factory in Germany, and before the end of 1929 a site at Cologne made available by the mayor of the city, Konrad Adenauer, [4] was acquired by Ford. [5] The 170,000 m2 site was originally intended to support an annual production of 250,000 cars, suggesting a continuation of the spirit of boundless economic optimism that seized western industry in the months preceding the 1929 Wall Street crash. Locating the plant directly beside the Rhine ensured that, as with Ford's other principal European manufacturing locations in Manchester, Dagenham and Berlin, there was excellent access to the water transport network. On 2 October 1930, Henry Ford, then aged 67, together with Adenauer, aged 55, laid the foundation stone for the Cologne Ford Plant: construction, which cost 12 million marks, progressed rapidly. The assembly operation in Berlin came to an end on 15 April 1931, and on 4 May 1931 the first Cologne-produced Ford rolled off the production line. [6] The first vehicle produced was a Ford Model A based truck which, whether by coincidence or by design ,would also be the first vehicle produced by Ford's new plant at Dagenham, England in October 1931. From that time, an increasing proportion of the Ford vehicles sold in Germany were also made locally, rather than being imported. The Model A was joined at Cologne in 1932 by the Model B.
Small car manufacture started in 1933 with the Ford Köln, a year after its British launch as the Model Y. With 2,453 produced in 1933 alone, the Köln propelled Ford to eighth place in the German passenger car sales charts for that year, [7] but it did not have the same impact in Germany as it did in Britain, and was undercut in price by the small Opel. [8]
The Ford Rheinland was a unique model for the German market, made by fitting a four-cylinder 3285 cc engine into a Model B V-8 chassis; but most products continued to be Detroit designs albeit with local names.
The Eifel was the German version of the 10 HP model which was sold in Britain as the Model C. 61,495 Eifels were produced by Ford Germany between 1935 and 1940, which was well over half of all the German Fords produced in the period. This enabled Ford's German sales to overtake those of Adler in 1938, making Ford Germany's fourth largest automaker, behind Opel, Mercedes-Benz and DKW. [7] The Eifel was joined in 1939 by the first of the long-running Taunus range.
The company was reorganised in 1939 and changed its name to Ford-Werke. [4] With the outbreak of the war, car production continued at first, and the Taunus was made until 1942, but increasingly, military production took over. Ford-Werke built both conventional trucks and Maultier half-tracks for the German armed forces. Most notably, Ford-Werke manufactured the turbines used in the V-2 rockets. [9]
During the bombing of Cologne, instructions were given to allied bombers to not to bomb the factory, owing to deep monetary ties of the American Ford Motor Company and Nazi Germany, [10] and hence was lightly damaged. After the war ended, production could restart in May 1945 with truck manufacture, the US government having paid $1.1 million in consideration of bombing damage. [4]
Car manufacturing restarted in late 1948 with the Taunus. Henry Ford II visited the factory in 1948 during his visit to Germany when he was considering a purchase of Volkswagen, with which he did not ultimately proceed. [4]
In 1952, a new Taunus appeared and was a great success, enabling record production figures to be reached.[ citation needed ] The company was now being run by Ehrhart Vitger, who spent time recruiting new dealers to replace those lost in East Germany, but the company continued to rank third in sales in Germany behind VW and Opel. [4]
Ford began to integrate the operations of its European subsidiaries in the 1960s with the launch of the 1965 Ford Transit panel van, which was a joint development between Ford of Britain and Ford-Werke, however it was the Ford Escort in 1968 that truly marked the end of unique models in European countries[ citation needed ] and followed the creation of Ford Europe in 1967 from the assets of the British and German operations.
General Motors would later follow Ford's lead in the 1970s by integrating its Opel and Vauxhall subsidiaries into GM Europe.
During the Second World War, Ford-Werke employed slave laborers, although not required to do so by the Nazi regime. [11] The deployment of slave labor began before Ford-Werke was separated from the Ford Motor Company in Dearborn, Michigan, while America had not yet entered the war.[ citation needed ]
Robert Hans Schmidt presided over Ford-Werke during the Second World War, and engaged slave labor and the illegal manufacture of munitions, including such manufacturing during the period before the U.S. entry into the war. Once the war was over, notwithstanding all his carefully publicized efforts to erase the stain of the company's past, no evidence emerged that either Henry Ford II or any other top-level Ford Motor Company executive had ever raised any moral objections to rehiring [Schmidt], who had presided over one of the company's darkest chapters. [12] However, a three-year study which was published by the Ford Motor Company in December 2001 maintained that the U.S. headquarters had no control over what happened at the German Ford-Werke when the Nazi forced labour policy went into effect. [13] It was also maintained that the German subsidiary did not provide profit for the U.S. headquarters. [13] John Rintamaki, Ford´s chief of staff, would acknowledge that Ford-Werke used forced labour, stating that "The use of forced and slave labor in Germany, including at Ford-Werke, was wrong and cannot be justified." [13]
In 1942, German soldiers swept into the city of Rostov in the Soviet Union, moving among the homes of Rostov families, forcing them to register at a labor registration center. Elsa Iwanowa, who was 16 years old at the time, and many other Russians were transported in cattle cars to Wuppertal in the western part of Germany, where they were exhibited to visiting businessmen. From there Elsa Iwanowa and others were forced to become slave laborers for Ford-Werke. "On March 4, 1998, fifty-three years after she was liberated from the German Ford plant, Elsa Iwanowa demanded justice, filing a class-action lawsuit in U.S. District Court against the Ford Motor Company." [14] In court, Ford acknowledged that Elsa Iwanowa and many others like her were "forced to endure a sad and terrible experience" at Ford-Werke; Ford, however, maintained that cases like that of Elsa Iwanowa are best redressed on "a nation-to-nation, government-to-government" basis. [9] By November 1998, compensation lawsuits were filed against Ford and GM. This put both the German subsidiaries of both companies under heavy scrutiny for their roles in aiding Nazi forced labor on their production lines in territory controlled by Nazi Germany during World War II. [15] In 1999, the court dismissed Elsa Iwanowa's suit; however, a number of German companies, including GM subsidiary Opel, agreed to contribute $5.1 billion to a fund that would compensate the surviving slave laborers. [9] After being the subject of much adverse publicity, Ford, in March 2000, reversed direction, and agreed to contribute $13 million to the industry-government restitution fund for an estimated 1.2 million survivors of Nazi forced labor during World War II. [16]
Until 27 January 1950, all Ford's European operations other than in the USSR were run from Dagenham and owned by Ford Motor Company Limited, Dearborn's 55% owned subsidiary. In Ford Motor Company Limited's published reports to their British shareholders, Germany and the other Ford European interests were referred to as "the associated companies". [17] These associated companies had been established in order to allow for substantial holdings by local shareholders. [note 1] On the outbreak of the Second World War, those shares in Ford Motor Company AG not belonging to German shareholders were placed under the control of the German Commissioner for dealing with enemy property.
In October 2004, when Aston Martin was a wholly owned subsidiary of Ford, the company set up a dedicated 12,500 square metres (135,000 sq ft) engine production plant within the Ford Niehl plant, with capacity to produce up to 5000 engines a year by 100 specially trained personnel. Like traditional Aston Martin engine production in Newport Pagnell, assembly of each unit is entrusted to a single technician from a pool of 30, with V8 and V12 variants assembled in under 20 hours. By bringing engine production back to within the company, the promise was that Aston Martin would be able to produce small runs of higher performance variants engines. [18]
Ford's corporate tagline is Eine Idee weiter., meaning “A step ahead” (literally, “An idea further”). This German tagline is used in German speaking countries in Europe.
Year | Units | Market share |
---|---|---|
2012 | 206,128 | 6.70% |
2011 | 230,939 | 7.31% |
2010 | 198,156 | 6.79% |
2009 | 290,620 | 7.63% |
2008 | 217,305 | 7.03% |
2007 | 213,873 | 6.79% |
2006 | 243,845 | 7.03% |
2005 | 246,814 | 7.38% |
2004 | 243,930 | 7.47% |
2003 | 235,279 | 7.27% |
The following tables list Ford production vehicles that were sold in Germany in 2023:
Focus | Small family car |
| |
Kuga | Compact crossover SUV |
| |
Puma | crossover SUV |
| |
Explorer | SUV |
| |
Explorer EV | SUV |
| |
Mustang Mach-E | SUV |
| |
Mustang | Muscle Car |
| |
Tourneo Connect | Panel van |
| |
Transit | Light commercial vehicle |
| |
Ranger | Pick-up truck |
|
Ford produce high-performance derivatives of their cars developed by their Ford Team RS division.
Ford Focus ST | Compact car |
| |
Ford Fiesta ST | Supermini |
|
This is a list of models produced by Ford Germany prior to the creation of Ford of Europe. Although the Taunus TC and MK3 Ford Cortina were related, the body work and engines were different.
The Ford Taunus is a family car that was sold by Ford Germany throughout Europe. Models from 1970 onward were built on the same basic construction as the Ford Cortina MkIII in the United Kingdom, and later on, the two car models were essentially the same, differing almost only in the placement of the steering wheel. The model line was named after the Taunus mountain range in Germany, and was first made in 1939, and continued through several versions until 1994.
The Opel Kadett is a small family car produced by the German automobile manufacturer Opel from 1936 until 1940 and then from 1962 until 1991, when it was succeeded by the Opel Astra.
The Ford Köln is an automobile that was produced by Ford Germany from 1933 until 1936 at its Cologne plant.
The Ford Eifel is a car manufactured by Ford Germany between 1935 and 1940. It initially complemented, and then replaced, the Ford Köln. It was itself replaced by the Ford Taunus.
The Ford Transit is a family of light commercial vehicles manufactured by the Ford Motor Company since 1965, primarily as a cargo van, but also available in other configurations including a large passenger van, cutaway van chassis, and a pickup truck. The vehicle is also known as the Ford T-Series, a nomenclature shared with Ford's other light commercial vehicles, the Ford F-Series trucks, and the Ford E-Series chassis. As of 2015, 8 million Transit vans have been sold, making it the third best-selling van of all time and has been produced across four basic platform generations, with various "facelift" versions of each.
The Ford Sidevalve is a side valve from the British arm of the Ford Motor Company, often also referred to as the "English Sidevalve". The engine had its origins in the 1930s Ford Model Y, and was made in two sizes, 933 cc (56.9 cu in) or "8 HP", and 1,172 cc (71.5 cu in) or "10 HP".
Ford France is the French subsidiary of the American automaker Ford Motor Company, which existed as a manufacturer under various names between 1916 and 1954, when Ford sold the manufacturing business to Simca.
The Ford Motor Company is an American automaker, the world's fifth largest based on worldwide vehicle sales. Based in Dearborn, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit, it was founded by Henry Ford on June 16, 1903. Ford Motor Company would go on to become one of the largest and most profitable companies in the world. The largest family-controlled company in the world, the Ford Motor Company has been in continuous family control for over 110 years. Ford now encompasses two brands: Ford and Lincoln. Ford once owned 5 other luxury brands: Volvo, Land Rover, Jaguar, Aston Martin, and Mercury. Over time, those brands were sold to other companies and Mercury was discontinued.
Ford of Europe GmbH is a subsidiary company of Ford Motor Company founded in 1967 in Cork, Ireland, with headquarters in Cologne, Germany.
The automotive industry in Germany, is one of the largest employers in the country, with a labor force of over 857,336 (2016) working in the industry.
Ford Dagenham is a major automotive factory located in Dagenham, London, operated by the Ford of Britain subsidiary of Ford Motor Company. The plant opened in 1931 and has produced 10,980,368 cars and more than 39,000,000 engines in its history. It covers around 475 acres and has received over £800 million of capital investment since 2000.
The Ford Taunus G93A is a small family car that was produced by Ford Germany between 1939 and 1942 in succession to the Ford Eifel. It was the first car developed at Cologne by Ford Germany which previously had built cars originated by Ford businesses in the US or the UK. Production began on 30 April 1939, with the first car exhibited to the public in June 1939, less than six months before the outbreak of war in Europe.
The Ford Taunus P1 is a small family car which was produced by Ford Germany from 1952 until 1962. It was marketed as the Ford Taunus 12M, and, between 1955 and 1959, as the larger-engined Ford Taunus 15M. The company produced a succession of Ford Taunus 12M models until 1970, as the name was applied to a succession of similarly sized cars, but the first Taunus 12M models, based on the company's Taunus Project 1 (P1), remained in production only until 1962. In that year the Taunus P1 series was replaced by the Taunus P4 series.
The Ford Taunus 17 M is a mid-sized family saloon that was produced by Ford Germany between August 1957 and August 1960. The Taunus 17M name was also applied to subsequent Ford models which is why the car is usually identified, in retrospect, as the Ford Taunus P2. It was the second newly designed German Ford to be launched after the war and for this reason it was from inception known within the company as Ford Project 2 (P2) or the Ford Taunus P2.
The Ford Taunus 17 M is a middle sized family saloon that was produced by Ford Germany between September 1960 and August 1964. The Taunus 17M name had been applied to the car's predecessor and it would apply also to subsequent Ford models which is why the 17M introduced in 1960 is usually identified, in retrospect, as the Ford Taunus P3. It was the third newly designed German Ford to be launched after the war and for this reason it was from inception known within the company as Ford Project 3 (P3) or the Ford Taunus P3.
The Ford Taunus 12M is a small family car produced by Ford Germany from September 1962 to August 1966.
The Ford Taunus 17 M is a middle-weight family saloon that was produced by Ford Germany between 1964 and 1967. The entire range was first presented in September 1964 and volume production of the two and four door saloons began in November 1964. The "Turnier" estate version followed in January 1965 with coupé bodied cars coming along some time later.
Karl Deutsch GmbH was a coach building firm known, in its later years, for converting mainstream motor cars into cabriolets. The business was located in Köln-Braunsfeld, a district on the west side of what today would be defined as central Cologne.
The Ford P7 is a range of large family saloons produced by Ford Germany between autumn 1967 and December 1971. The P7 was marketed as the Ford 17M, Ford 20M and Ford 26M.
The Ford Taunus TC is a range of large family cars that were built by Ford Germany from 1970 until 1982. The Taunus TC was based on the same basic construction as the Ford UK's Cortina range, with the "TC" badge standing for Taunus Cortina.
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