Why Ford now wants to make for the world from India
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Automobile giant Ford Motor Co., which stopped manufacturing vehicles in India in August 2022, plans to resurrect its manufacturing facility in Chennai, Tamil Nadu to use India as an export hub. Observers may wonder why the American carmaker has decided to return to India.
It had accumulated losses of $2 billion in operations before it shuttered its Chennai plant and sold its other facility in Sanand, Gujarat to Tata Motors Ltd. In truth, Ford continued to have a large presence in India even after it stopped selling cars in the country. The company employs 12,000 personnel in India to service and provide spare parts for the million-odd Ford vehicles on Indian roads, and it also reportedly does some design in India.
Reopening the Chennai plant could lead to 2,500-3,000 new hires, although details about Ford’s deal with the Tamil Nadu government are sparse. It’s also not clear if Ford will focus on electric vehicles or regular petrol-diesel cars. Ford has been working on designing an affordable EV platform.
Reports suggest that Ford is looking at manufacturing EVs in India but this is not confirmed. Given that Tata Motors and its British subsidiary Jaguar Land Rover and Vietnam’s Vinfast Auto Ltd manufacture electric vehicles in Tamil Nadu, a strong EV ecosystem already exists in the state. Ford’s Chennai facility had enough capacity to produce 200,000 petrol vehicles annually, out of a total 350,000 internal combustion engines.
Its assembly lines would need to be reorganised completely to manufacture electric vehicles. Here’s what we know for sure: Chennai is a big export hub for passenger vehicles. India exported 672,000 passenger vehicles in 2023-24, with a large contribution from
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