At the end of March 2022, the last Ford Mondeo will drop off the line in Valencia, Spain. The carmaker thus confirmed the inevitable end of the once popular management model. No successor is planned.
The reasons are clear, sales in the Mondea segment are not what they used to be, customer preferences have shifted from sedans, liftbacks and station wagons to SUVs. “The middle class has been fading for several years, with sales currently at 80 percent in 2000,” a Ford spokesman was quoted as saying. Automotive News Europe.
European Ford boss Stewart Rowley told the same magazine that his company wanted to invest in growing market segments. Among them are smaller SUVs.
Mondeo, after launching its first generation in 1993, which then replaced the Sierra model, defined the middle class. His popularity is also evidenced by the fact that in 1996, the Labor Party in Great Britain targeted “Mondeo-men”, a successful middle-class voter.
A total of five million units were sold, which was to be the first “global” Ford, a single model for the whole world, which was to simplify the model offer of the American brand.
It can be said that Mondeo has largely reached the global policy of the carmaker. Customer interest in SUVs was not the only problem that his, now we can write with a clear conscience, had to deal with the last, fourth generation.
The car was introduced as a sibling of the North American Fusion model (it has nothing to do with the European miniMPV) at the autumn Paris Motor Show in 2012. However, it did not enter the market until two years later and around the same time as the then more modern key competitor Volkswagen Passat. The reason was the complicated closure of the Belgian factory in Genk, where the third generation of the Mondea was produced, and the difficult start-up of the lines in Valencia, Spain.
After the end of Mondeo’s production, the MPV S-Max and Galaxy will continue to be created there, as well as the medium-sized SUV Kuga. The production of a 2.5-liter petrol engine, which uses hybrid variants of the mentioned models, is to be moved to Spain from Spain.
Ford also announced that it will increase its planned 24 million investment in the Valencia plant by 5.2 million euros. The reason is the plan to assemble batteries of electrified variants there as well. The carmaker plans to sell only purely electric passenger cars in Europe from 2030.
The end of Mondea marks another departure from the non-premium middle class. Honda with the Accord, Hyundai with the i40, Kia with the Optima, Citroën with the C5 již have already vacated the European position in it. Renault has also stopped production of the sedan version of its Talisman model (only a station wagon is available) there will be interest in it and emission standards will allow it. Toyota imports a larger Camry sedan into Europe in a hybrid version.
The PSA Group is likely to continue to hold its representatives in the segment. In addition to the still relatively young Peugeot 508, a new generation of Opel Insignia could arrive next year. The position is also not yet to be vacated by Volkswagen, for 2023 the new generations of Passat and Superb have been confirmed. According to unofficial reports, the former should be offered in Europe only as a Variant station wagon.
However, sales of classic middle class representatives have been falling for a long time. According to JATO Dynamics, they fell by almost 30 percent last year to almost 300,000 specimens. The best-selling model was the VW Passat, the second was the Škoda Superb and the third the Peugeot 508 with an almost 50% drop in sales.
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