Though still smarting from what wasn’t the most successful arguing on their behalf at Congress last week, Ford Motor Company had already decided to “do things differently” before senators and congressmen kept asking them to do so. Yesterday the Wayne, Michigan plant that had been partly responsible for the hundreds of thousands of F-150s, Expeditions, and their offspring stopped building vehicles to ready it for small car production.
51 years ago the Wayne plant began building large vehicles for Ford and has gone through the F-Series, Broncos, Expeditions, and Navigators. Another plant that switched from trucks to small cars is the Cuautitlan, Mexico facility that will be building the Ford Fiesta (Scottish car of the year, yippee) by 2010. Ford will invest $75,000,000 in the Wayne plant just for a spectacular body shop. That cost is over and above the cost of basic re-tooling and reorganizing.
