Ford cancels plans to sell Focus Active in US
Ford says tariffs enacted by the Trump administration would cut too heavily into profits.
Ford has officially canceled its plans to import the Focus Active to the US next year. The high-riding hatchback would've been the only Focus variant sold stateside following the company's car lineup reduction, but tariffs put in place by the Trump administration no longer make it feasible to import the Active from China.
Ford told reporters Friday that the tariffs would too deeply cut into profits, especially since the automaker only planned to sell fewer than 50,000 Focus Active models annually. Ford also said it will not change its mind about dropping the Focus Active from its lineup should the tariffs go away.
"The impact to our future sales is expected to be marginal," Kumar Galhotra, Ford's president of North America, told reporters on a conference call Friday, according to Automotive News. The Focus Active was originally scheduled to arrive in the second half of 2019.
Ford will shift the focus of its lineup to trucks, SUVs and electrified utility vehicles in the coming years. The automaker has already confirmed it plans to discontinue the Fiesta , (regular) Focus, Fusion and Taurus in the US, with only the Mustang sports car sticking around.
The Active is a high-riding version of the new Ford Focus, which will now never set tire on US soil.
"This is not us shrinking and reducing our size in the marketplace, it's all about reallocating our resources into the marketplace where we can win," Hau Thai-Tang, Ford's executive vice president of product development and purchasing, told Roadshow in an earlier report.
The Trump administration's proposed import tariffs could have a huge impact on a number of automakers. General Motors has asked the government to exclude the Chinese-built Buick Envision from the tariffs and Volvo has shifted US-bound XC60 production to European plants to hopefully avoid the penalty. Of course, similar tariffs could be enacted on European-built cars, which could cause even more problems down the road.
