There Could Be a Ford in Mazda’s Future
Japan’s Mazda Motor Corp. is talking with Ford Motor Co. about selling Ford trucks through U.S. Mazda dealers in a reversal of Mazda’s traditional relationship with Ford, Mazda’s president said Tuesday.
Norimasa Furuta also said Mazda plans to introduce a sporty Japanese-built mini-van this fall and will decide by year-end whether to build an engine plant at Flat Rock, Mich., where its assembly plant opened in September.
Ford owns 25% of Mazda and receives more than half the cars produced at Flat Rock, which was built on the site of a closed Ford metal-casting plant. The engine plant would be part of an effort to increase the U.S. content of cars made at Flat Rock to 75% by 1991, Furuta told the Automotive News World Congress.
Mazda expects to sell 270,000 imported and domestic cars and 100,000 trucks in the United States during 1988 and eventually wants to sell 500,000 vehicles a year here.
Ironically, Ford sold Mazda compact pickups before Ford developed its own small trucks earlier this decade. Mazda also supplied Ford first with small cars and then began sharing development with Ford, as with the new Probe--designed by Ford, engineered by Mazda, built by Mazda at Flat Rock and sold by Ford dealers. A second version of the car, the Mazda MX-6, is sold by Mazda dealers.
“Now our relationship has reached the stage where there may be the opportunity in some future programs for the historical roles to be reversed,” Furuta said. “Ford could supply Mazda with components and could build vehicles for Mazda to sell . . . entering a new age of true reciprocity.”
Furuta said Mazda is talking with Ford on a wide variety of subjects including the possibility of selling Ford compact pickups through U.S. Mazda dealers because of the strength of the Japanese yen and the 25% U.S. duty on Japanese pickups.
Other small pickup alternatives could include assembling the pickups in Japan from U.S.-made parts--which would not be subject to the duty when the trucks were shipped to the United States, he said.
