Ford Won't Sell the Focus Active in America Thanks to Trump's Tariffs
Earlier this year, Ford announced an audacious plan to move away from passenger cars, instead focusing the entire brand on trucks, crossovers, and utility vehicles, along with the Mustang. That meant that while the United States wouldn't get the Focus, it would get the Focus Active, a lifted, crossover-y version that would be imported from Ford's factory in China.
Unfortunately, that's no longer the case.
Thanks to new tariffs being placed on Chinese imports by the Trump administration, Ford is scrapping those plans, meaning that the U.S. will be without a Focus for the first time in nearly two decades.
It's purely a business decision. The Focus Active will also be made in Europe, but the margins are such that importing it from Germany wouldn't make any financial sense. That means the loss of the Focus Active in America is purely a casualty of the escalating trade war between the United States and China. Ford told Automotive News that even if the tariffs were retracted, the company wouldn't change course and import the Active.
When reached for comment, a Ford spokesperson didn't seem too concerned with the change to its future plans, telling us that Ford didn't expect to sell more than 50,000 of the vehicles per year in the U.S. market in the first place, which means that impact to sales volume would be negligible. That may sound like a lot of cars, but to Ford that makes the Focus Active "low volume."
Ford isn't immediately abandoning all cars, of course. The Mustang isn't going anywhere, while the Fiesta will stick around for another year and the Fusion will soldier on for a few more after that. But the Focus, as we know it, is dead.
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