Vic Daenen, the Belgian who makes the best of Ford’s ‘late’ EV job

Last week, Ford Cologne started ramping up production of its two European EVs, the Explorer SUV and the new Capri, a fully electric crossover. Both are up to 70% more Volkswagen than Ford as they extensively use VW’s MEB platform, siblings of the ID.4 and ID.5.

Turning the old Fiesta factory into a modern zero-emission factory for fully electric vehicles with parts from a ‘competitive partner’ was a daunting job for its plant manager, the Belgian Vic Daenen, the former plant manager at Ford Genk.

Building ICE cars for 93 years

We meet Vic Daenen for a personal guided tour with a handful of Belgian journalists in his factory, Ford’s Cologne Electric Vehicle Center. It started in 1931 as the carmaker’s European headquarters, building the Ford A. However, Ford already ‘landed’ in Europe in 1925 in Berlin, and since then, 40 million Ford cars have been built in Europe.

That’s 40 million cars with an internal combustion engine (ICE), and only now has Ford started building fully electric vehicles for Europe, in Europe, with the Explorer and the Capri. Converting a factory that has made ICE cars for 93 years to assemble a completely different type of car, a battery electric vehicle, cost Ford around two billion euros and required incredible planning, training, and work.

Daenen, 53 now, joined the Ford factory in Genk, Belgium, in 1990 as a Quality Systems Coordinator. He worked his way through several supervising and quality managing functions to become the Belgian factory’s Trim&Final Area Manager from 2006 to 2010.

In 2011, he moved to Ford’s European headquarters in Cologne, Germany, as Manufacturing Business Office Carline Manager, to return to Genk in 2012 as Assistant Plant Manager. At that time, Ford dropped the ‘bomb,’ announcing the closure of the Genk factory by 2014.

Vic Daenen had the not-so-enviable task of leading the closure as Plant Manager in Genk. After that, he moved to Cologne in 2015 to lead Ford’s ‘Fiesta factory,’ which produced up to 450,000 cars a year in its peak days. But even a popular model like the Fiesta isn’t a ‘life insurance’ for a factory of this size.

Daenen says making a decent profit on a compact B-segment car like the Ford Fiesta, built in a land with high labor costs, is hard to accomplish unless you have the economy of scale by producing lots of it. Fiesta was loss-making most of its lifespan.

Costly over-engineering

From the factory man’s point of view, who has to build the product designed by the developers, the Fiesta was kind of ‘over-engineered’ to reach a quality level most clients probably don’t ask for in this segment. It makes production more complex and more costly.

Daenen points out the endless variations in colors, trim, and options offered. The Fiesta cost a lot of money to produce compared to today’s simplified offerings. For the Explorer, for instance, there are just six exterior colors and two interior trim variants.

In the last years of its lifespan, Ford decided to radically simplify the variations on the Fiesta, making the last batch of 350,000 cars built in Cologne the most profitable of the range. The last one rolled off the assembly line in July 2023. Then, the factory had to be wholly reconverted.

Dieselgate as a wake-up call

Like most European car manufacturers who couldn’t imagine the internal combustion engine would be an ending story, Ford was pretty late to start thinking of building electric cars.

It took a ‘dieselgate’ scandal for Europe to wake up when Volkswagen finally was the first to admit in 2015 that it had used cheating software to escape stringent CO2 and NOx emission restrictions. A practice other carmakers proved not to be averse to either in some way or another.

At that time, Vic Daenen was closing Ford Genk in Belgium. He now sees that dieselgate has been an accelerator in the EU’s Green Deal, forcing even more stringent emission standards and pushing the industry to abandon its ICE technology rapidly for pure electric before 2035.

Coming to the rescue

Ironically, it proved to be Volkswagen that had to come to the rescue for Ford. Unlike most Western competitors, it was the first to start a massive investment in EV technology in an attempt to keep up with the Chinese. There, the government had pushed its car industry toward electric a decade before, as smog was regularly choking its major cities.

Volkswagen’s offer of its MEB modular car platform for electric cars, which it had developed in a tearing hurry, was an opportunity for Ford to make the best of a lousy job in developing its own EVs in time.

Ford CEO Jim Farley told journalists in the US in an interview that it took him only 15 minutes to convince the Ford family in 2020 to partner with Volkswagen to rapidly develop an EV alternative for Europe.

Eventually, it took the Volkswagen Group two months to get the deal with competitor Ford approved internally by all the stakeholders, including the unions. This already shows the differences in culture between the two giant carmakers. Ford even ‘lured’ in Martin Sander, an Audi veteran, as the new Ford Europe boss. Sander eventually returned to Volkswagen in July of this year.

Inextricably bound up

But Daenen, when asked if this sudden romance was rather a ‘panic reaction’ of Ford in those days, points at other opportunities that made this a viable deal. While Ford uses VW’s platform to build the Explorer and Capri, VW is leaning heavily on Ford’s expertise in light commercial vehicles like the Transit for its Transporter range.

So today, it works both ways; they are inextricably bound up in some ways. That’s immediately visible when you walk through the Ford factory in Cologne today. Everywhere you see boxes with spare parts labeled ‘Volkswagen AG’.

In essence, Volkswagen’s MEB platform, which underpins the Ford models, defines most of the car, including electric motors, batteries, drivetrains, and software. Ford adds its accents with different body side panels, bonnets, and roofs fabricated and welded locally. Also, the interior has a distinct Ford label, but it basically drives the same as VW’s ID.4 and ID.5.

It sounds like a simple thing to accomplish. Still, it took Ford and its plant manager over a year to convert the factory and ‘re-invent’ some of the production processes, as both carmakers have different ways of doing this. At the same time, making the factory of the future ‘lean and green,’ meaning being carbon neutral.

Platform-driven approach

Vic Daenen explains that Volkswagen has a rather ‘platform-driven’ approach focusing mainly on the final product. In contrast, Ford has a history of a more cost-efficient manufacturing approach when developing a new model, considering easier production. However, for Ford Cologne, this meant it had to adjust many of its processes to match Volkswagen’s sometimes more complex way of working.

One example is the number of computer units (CPUs) used by the MEB platform for all the car’s functions: 54 different ones, compared to an average of 20 in Ford models. These CPUs must be connected, software loaded, and communication tested during the assembly process. That can be very complex, Daenen says.

To make matters worse, Volkswagen apparently underestimated the complexity of the software involved and had to postpone the launch of several models of its own EVs accordingly. Ford decided to wait for Volkswagen to sort out the software problems to guarantee the quality of its new European EVs, meaning a nearly seven-month standstill for the factory.

The factory is automated to the maximum extent, meaning 600 completely new robots in all disciplines, like welding (126), handling (143), sealing and adhesives (10), bolt welding (13), and measuring (4), to give some examples. However, with cars weighing 1,000 kgs more than a Fiesta, all handling requires structural adaptation, too.

Ford Cologne now has 2,600 fully employed workers and 400 part-time workers in the factory, compared to 4,500 in the glory years. Training these people in time to build a completely different type of car took a minimum of 12 training days or 157 hours per employee, or a total of 320,000 hours.

630 cars per day

Ford Cologne is finally ramping up production to 630 cars per day, or a maximum of 230,000 per year. However, analysts think Ford will need to sell at least 200,000 of these EVs in Europe a year to meet the EU’s CO2 targets for the car industry.

And this, while EV sales have cooled drastically, especially in Germany, after the government scrapped incentives. Vic Daenen is convinced European and US carmakers alike will have to produce cheaper and with shorter development cycles to compete with China.

He says the Chinese automotive industry is shooting itself in the foot with the EU imposing tariffs on Chinese import cars. Welcoming the Chinese to build their cars in Europe to preserve local employment is a false promise, he thinks.

For example, Daenen points to some brands that transfer up to 2,000 Chinese workers to Hungary to live in container villages near the factory. He believes, though, that Europe has to allow some deceleration in the industry’s transition by reviewing its stringent CO2 policy.

But that’s another discussion, and it proves that today, it’s not easy to get everyone to adopt the same line on matters among European carmakers. It is to be continued, without doubt.