Geelong’s role in new Ford
THE Australian car industry is on the comeback trail and Geelongbased engineers are heavily involved.
The first locally designed and engineered Ford – since the Melbourne factory shut its doors five years ago – will be unveiled on Wednesday to a global audience before its launch in 180 different markets around the world.
The new Ranger ute, which heralds a remarkable recovery for the motoring company, will also share its mechanical underpinnings with the all-new Volkswagen Amarok ute and a new off-roader to be sold in the US.
Despite no longer producing cars domestically, Australia is one of Ford’s three main global research and development hubs alongside the US and Europe.
More than $2.5bn has been invested since 2016 and the ranks of the Geelong and Broadmeadows-based engineers and designers have swelled to more than 2500.
Ian Foston, the lead engineer for the Ranger platform, said many former Ford employees were brought into the team.
“We had very few actual salaried staff who were made redundant when the plant closed; they were retrained and re-purposed (within the local operations),” Mr Foston said.
“The skills of the team, in terms of the new technology put into vehicles, is in itself cutting-edge stuff. We do most of the stuff virtually – all the analysis tools and the team we use in the early phases. Those skills, if you lost them, you’d never get them back.”
Australian designers and engineers had become sought after around the world.
“There is such a shortage of those skills globally, software developers and people who understand autonomous technology and connectivity,” he said.
Mr Foston said that despite its global focus, the new Ranger had a uniquely Australian feel, thanks to the input of local staff who owned utes and understood how people used them here.
The team built about 300 prototype vehicles and another 40 to 50 early development mules at the old Broadmeadows factory, using former manufacturing employees.
“We have a skilled manufacturing team. A lot of that team is from the plant shutdown, they’ve stayed on and have done all the prototype builds,” Mr Foston said.
Aside from the Volkswagen Amarok, the new Ranger platform will also form the basis for the rebirth of the vaunted Ford Bronco in the US.
Ironically, that vehicle will only be produced in left-hand drive and there are no plans to convert it for local use.
The new Ranger was put through some of Australia’s harshest conditions, including some of the country’s most demanding off-road tracks. Much of the testing was carried out at the You Yangs where Ford has a dedicated proving ground.
The location, which has been used to test countless Falcons over several decades, boasts a state-ofthe-art testing facility, complete with a lab for global emissions testing, a powertrain and dynamics development rig and a crash-test lab.
The facility can also test and develop advanced driver-assist technology such as autonomous parallel parking.
“If we didn’t have these things in Australia we’d have to send the cars around the world,” Mr Foston said.
The design centre at the company’s Broadmeadows property has undergone a $12m upgrade and now houses more than 200 designers. The company still has a big presence in Geelong, too, where the team oversees the powertrain and chassis development for the new Ranger.