Volkswagen Transporter 7
In a recent Ford Transit Custom press release regarding their next generation all electric model, there was quite an interesting sentence that may have gone unnoticed by many people and it was actually on the very popular and highly regarded Volkswagen Transporter 7 which will also have an all-electric model.
Ford and Volkswagen – a partnership in time
It may come as a surprise to many people but Ford Commercial Vehicle and Volkswagen Commercial Vehicle announced over a year ago that they were going to share platforms on effectively on their van and pickup range. It was decided by the senior management that Ford would develop the next generation Ranger and subsequently this would be re-badged as the next generation Volkswagen Amarok.
For their part Volkswagen would develop a ‘city van’ which will become the Caddy for Volkswagen and the new Transit Connect, although the name is still not completely decided.
Ford Transit Custom is also the Volkswagen Transporter 7
Perhaps the highest volumes will come from the onw tonne van sector partnership, with Ford this week confirming they will be building the next generation Ford Transit Custom at their plant in Turkey and will include an all-electric model in addition to plug-in hybrid, mild hybrid and conventional engine variants. So
It is planned to go into production in the first half of 2023, with all-electric versions of both models part of the most extensive Transit Custom range ever offered to European customers and in addition, the next generation Volkswagen 1-tonne commercial vehicle also will be built in Kocaeli, adding valuable scale to vehicle platforms and enhancing the customer experience by bringing more technologies to market, faster.
Why Turkey?
This is a Ford not a Volkswagen factory, indeed to be truthful its not even Ford’s – its owned by Koc Holdings and their relationship with Ford dates back to 1928, and today Ford Otosan is the leading company in the Turkish auto industry and one of the longest running and most successful joint ventures in the global auto industry.
Ford Otosan’s Kocaeli facilities opened in 2001, and since 2004 has been Ford’s global lead plant for the production of successive generations of the Ford Transit Custom range and the Transit 2-tonne. The Ford Courier range is manufactured at Ford Otosan’s Yenikoy Assembly Plant also located in Kocaeli. In total, around 85 percent of the sales of the complete Transit family of commercial vehicles are from vehicles manufactured by Ford Otosan in Turkey.
Ford Otosan stated last December that it plans to invest more than €2 billion to increase vehicle and battery pack assembly capacity production at Kocaeli, and that it expects to increase employment by around 3,000 people