[Franco Cozzo]

Originally Posted by simon varley

when I left 18 months ago, there were really only a couple of big development programs in progress, but after that not much. SuperDuty and PHEV have now been announced and are in launch phase, so what does that leave for the development team? I'd have to say probably not much. There are always the facelift programs, and emissions upgrade programs, but outside that I don't know. With relatively little content, it doesn't need a massive local team to run any of these.

A huge amount of work has already been outsourced to low cost labour countries, and a huge amount of skill and knowledge has been let go over the last two years. I hope I'm wrong, but I really don't give the development team locally more than a couple more years before the lights are turned off.

This guy was all over it, 8 years ago.

Originally Posted by Trump

For some odd reason, Australians have this sense of "nah (XYZ) won't/can't happen here, we're special". Despite some impressive contributions by people within Ford Australia, Ford Motor Company is an American corporation, with an American way of doing business. The American way of doing business is to cut the costs of doing business by any means. Moving high labour cost business units to countries where the cost of labour is far lower is the first rule in the US business playbook.

The Australian engineering outfit at the moment is a necessary evil in their eyes; they are wearing the cost of keeping it running because China isn't up to scratch yet. As such, don't for a second think that Ford HQ won't pull the rug from under the Australian operation when the Chinese engineering teams get up to speed and begin producing work of comparable quality to their Australian counterparts.

Making a comment like that doesn't require any inside knowledge, it's Business USA 101.