It was a pretty stark admission from a Ford spokesman on a recent launch: “The Ford Kuga is now our heartland car.” This, from a company that brought us bona fide ‘people’s cars’ like the Ford Focus, Ford Fiesta and Ford Escort.
This too, though, from a company that has been brave enough to kill off the Mondeo. It seems Ford - once so intrinsically linked with hatchbacks - is not afraid to make tough decisions in order to ensure it builds the car customers want nowadays.
Let’s just let all that sink in for a moment. The Focus, the icon that redefined a sector, claimed bedroom poster honours in its hallowed Martini WRC livery and provided the basis for some of the best hot hatchbacks in living memory, no longer sits front and centre at Ford’s product strategy meetings.
It’s clear in the marketing where Ford is aiming. Some 70% of the company’s advertising spend in the UK is going against the Kuga, Puma and Mustang Mach-E.
The Kuga gains not one, not two, but three hybrid variants (if you count the mild hybrid version), plus a whole gamut of diesels and petrols. You can get it in front- or four-wheel-drive, and Ford clearly sees it as the successor to the Mondeo, as one-time saloon buyers aim to put a bit more clearance between their backsides and the ground.
The non-ST Focus? It gets just one electrified option, and even that is only a mild hybrid.
Are we, so to speak, losing Focus, then? Honestly, despite all the above, I can’t see it. Although the Focus dropped out of the top 10 best selling cars in April, that was more than likely just a blip. Overall, Ford still sold 40,000 of them in 2020, a healthy 13,700 up on the Puma. The Mondeo managed just 2400 sales in 2020.
Those April figures were also compounded by the worldwide shortage of chips. A spokesman for Ford said that the shortage of semiconductors mean sales figures are “not a normal situation at the moment”, as Ford prioritises production for the likes of Kuga, Puma and Mach-E because “that’s where the growth is”.
But it’s also clear the Focus will probably never regain the market share it once enjoyed. We may well be witnessing the beginning of the end of an era.
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Went for my daily constitutional,and did a quick car count of which brands passed by in a minute, of the five cars that went by, two were BMW and two were VW, the fifth was....a Honda Civic, haven't seen many Fiestas or Focus, have seen lots of Pumas though, but nothing like the number of the German brands mentioned, why is that?
Ditching market segments isn't the way to go about things - they'll only end up narrowing their own customer base. Not everyone wants a crossover or SUV, and when the fashions change they'll find themselves without anything in their range that anyone wants to buy.
I had a Focus way back on an 06' plate, just a 1600cc ,but it was comfortable,handled well ,manual box was great, it took five on hols too,now the SUV is thee car to have, usually in that flat grey color with big Alloys, and Ford isn't going to miss out, they'll mine the SUV vein till the next fad comes along, the Focus?, is now a Puma.