According to the BBC he Ford Motor Company has said in a letter to it’s employees at their Southampton UK plant that future Ford Transit production was “under review” and may be cut in half and/or moved abroad.

Ford at Southampton employs about 1350 people and produces over 70,000 Ford Transit vans a year.

The Transit has long been the staple van in use for light haulage and multi-drop deliveries in the UK beating off most competition and having a reputation pretty-good reliability in the face of constant ‘misuse’.

Ford has been making the Transit at Southampton since 1971 and is largely supplied with body panel pressing from Frod at Dagenham so I’d guess there could be a possibility of jobs being at risk there too. Aparently, the current rumour suggests 50% of production could be moved to Turkey.

As I wrote earlier this month, the MEGA battery-electric van factory in Channas, France burnt to the ground on the first of December. Obviously things, to my UK eyes looked bleak for MEGA. The rest of Aixam’s lines were still able to make cars but I thought that the MEGA line could be out of action for months. Despite this, a confident press release at the time mentioned that MEGA had already rented a new building. Surely false optimism, I thought.

But no, as of the 18th of December, incredibly there is a new MEGA van on the production line at the new factory!

Orders received end of November will certainly be delivered within the end of
January 2008 – which means less than 8 weeks delivery time. People will
work hard between Christmas and New Year’s Day to speed up the
rehabilitation.

Well, I’ll never be able to accuse the French of being work-shy. Any British company faced with such a crisis of a destroyed factory and line would surely have either gone out of business or at least suspended the line. It must take some true grit and determination to get a line back in production in just three weeks.

I wish MEGA every success with their facelift MEGA Van model line.

You can read the full press release HERE

Et la version française est ICI