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New Electric Ford Focus Underway
New Ford Focus is reportedly underway, an EV that was discontinued in 2018 due to poor sales.
Its best annual performance was just under 2,000 units, way fewer than the comparable Nissan Leaf.
Ford had one of the earliest production EVs on offer, launched just less than a year after the Tesla Model S. It was not a rival for the Tesla, though, being aimed more at the Nissan Leaf which had somewhat similar specs.
But the Focus Electric, which was discontinued in 2018, was a very poor sales performer whose best annual performance was just under 2,000 units, way fewer than the comparable Leaf.
It had a 123 horsepower electric motor that drove the front wheels and a top speed of 135 km/h (84 mph). The battery pack in early examples was comprised of LG Chem lithium-ion cells that totaled 23 kW; this was upped to 33.5 kWh in 2017 when the vehicle also got 50 kWh fast charging.
Now a report published on Autocar says Ford’s design boss, Murat Guler, hinted that the Blue Oval was working on a new Focus Electric that would be launched in the next few years. However, what he actually said was
Everybody’s launching electric cars and we will launch a few in the future. Definitely, we’re looking at everything: proportions, architectures… we’re really busy designing all the next-generation cars. There’s a lot of work going on.
Perhaps Autocar has additional information that it did not share in the article (or it could just be speculation presented as certainty, which the publication has done in the past), but Gueler makes no mention of an electric Focus.
It would certainly make sense for Ford to have a rival for Volkswagen’s very good ID.3, although even if this turns out to be the case, we won’t see the vehicle for probably at least around two more years.
What may shorten the development time for the electric Focus would be for Ford to use Volkswagen’s MEB platform. The Blue Oval has signed an agreement with VW to use MEB for an upcoming sub-Mach-E electric crossover due in 2023, but it also made it clear that it could use the modular EV architecture in more models.
It would make sense for a new electric hatchback from Ford to be built on MEB, although since Gueler’s statement makes it sound like work on the model is not very advanced. If this turns out to be true, then it will probably debut after the aforementioned crossover – last we heard about this was back in May of this year when Ford was reportedly close to deciding on the electric hatch.
