CHENNAI (Diya TV) — Already facing heavy scrutiny for moving vehicle production facilities to Mexico, Ford Motor Co. plans to begin exporting small sport-utility vehicles to the U.S. from India late next year.
The automaker will export the EcoSport — Ford’s smallest SUV in their global lineup — from its plant in the southern India city of Chennai. It will start sending them from India in late 2017 and they will be available at dealerships in early 2018, a Ford spokesman said.
Such a move marks the inaugural occasion Ford will sell Indian-made vehicles in the U.S., where the company have been manufacturing vehicles for more than 20 years.
“Commencement of exports to the U.S. marks a significant milestone in Ford’s Make-in-India journey and boosts India’s credentials as a world-class manufacturing hub,” Kapil Sharma, a spokesman for Ford in India, told the Wall Street Journal.
The development is just the latest in a series of moves from the American auto industry, as it struggles to justify keeping manufacturing of certain vehicles in the U.S. General Motors have already planned to cut thousands of jobs at factories across the country, Fiat-Chrysler have completely abandoned American manufacturing for its smaller vehicles, relying solely on imports for that part of their lineup.
Since its introduction in 2013, the India-made EcoSport has been a success story in the country and elsewhere around the globe. Ford have exported more than 200,000 units of the vehicle to more than 50 countries from Chennai since its inception. The EcoSport is also manufactured in five other countries, including Brazil.
Information from the Wall Street Journal contributed to this report.
