Frustration with Ranger, Everest shipping headaches triggers Ford decision to get its own boat. 

TAKING a leaf out of the original owner’s handbook, Ford in this region has taken direct control of a ship to resolve issues with getting Rangers and Everests to Kiwi customers.

The Grand Quest will fly under the Blue Oval flag for the next three years, sailing purely from the factory in Thailand and dropping off supply of the one-tonne ute and its related sports utility wagon to just New Zealand and Australia.

Securing the roll-on, roll-off vessel is a big thing. Most brands simply rely on third party providers.

But Ford has had enough of that. Demand for the vehicles, Ranger especially, is high - but shipping has been a nightmare, largely due to delays at Australia’s ports.

Ranger showing an unnatural and, for Ford, unwelcome, slump in June; a vital month. Ford NZ failing to achieve then a big load of Rangers buyers sought to receive ahead of the July 1 amendment to Clean Car was a huge disruption.

Not getting the vehicles in time to avoid a regulation amendment with further raised - by no small amount - penalty of owning a ute (because, remember, there’s that thing about their CO2 being too high for our clean air rules) would not have been taken kindly by customers or dealers.

The issue has been building for more than a year. The major headache for delays is quarantine inspections and cleaning as part of our neighbour’s biohazard protection programme, said to be even more rigorous than our own. 

Ford agrees that effectively buying - or, really, leasing - a ship may not impact that issue, it has decided to take matters into its own hands, but it at least allows them more of a say about where it goes and when. Conceivably, if there’s a sign of impending issues at, say, Melbourne, during the downward voyage, the ship could divert to Auckland instead.

The vessel isn’t the biggest involved in this duty, but is nonetheless capable of carrying up to 2600 vehicles per shipment. 

This isn’t the first time Ford had issue with shipping its vehicles. The United States’ based Ford Authority website reports a railway wagon shortage on their home turf has impacted deliveries. 

Various bottlenecks in production have also prompted Ford CEO Jim Farley to say that the company might need to vertically integrate.

This new lease is potentially a sign that the company intends to follow through on that course of action when needed, although Farley’s comments were about EV raw material processing, mainly in respect to its electric car programme, which has just received another big investment, of around $NZ100 billion. That’s the sort of money needed to realise aspiration of it making more than two million EVs a year.

New Zealand demand for Ranger has been impressive over the past year - though Clean Car is clearly out to get utes, the Ford model and its closest rival, Toyota Hilux, kept trucking on, with the Ford achieving some astounding monthly volumes.

No-one in the industry seems prepared to say if the July 1 regulation revision is the legislation that will kill that consumer desire.

As it basically all but doubled the penalty on some versions of those and other turbodiesel one-tonners to point where some heft more than $7000 in fees, there’s surely got to be impact.

July was an especially quiet month, but the August count will be a more accurate barometer as to the stickability of the regulations. 

However, beyond that there are just two more months until the general election, with the current administration’s biggest foe running on a promise to pull the penalty, on grounds utes are vital to the national economy, because of the reliance on them from rural and worksite users. Which might be true - though stats also consistently show the biggest sellers are the double cab automatic turbodiesel kinds specified to the hilt. Basically, the models dressed to appeal to families and weekend warriors.

Ford Australia hasn’t seen the same Ranger rush, but it is doing well. the V6 petrol Raptor is strong there and so are the V6 turbodiesel.

The company is currently in the middle of prepping Ford F-150 pickups for conversion to right-hand drive, as the full-size model is imported from the United States, though that will come on a different ship. Likely the one that sails regularly from Mexico with the Mustang Mach-E electric car.

And what about that reference in the introduction? It’s a reminder that, when Ford kicked off in the early 1900s to become the world’s biggest car maker, based purely on sale of its ground-breaking Model T, founder Henry Ford for a whole determined every aspect of that car’s production should be in company control. For a short while, it even tried to run a rubber plantation in Brazil’s Amazon so it could make its own tyres and other components.

The latter, Fordlandia, proved a massive failure - a lot to do with trying to re-establish a plant native to South East Asia in a total different part of the world - but Ford nonetheless for a long time owned mines, steel works and all sorts.

To get the raw materials to its factories, particularly the mothership of the Rouge at Dearborn, neat Detroit, Henry Ford began acquiring his own fleet of ships for the company by ordered two ore carriers to be built. The Henry Ford II and Benson Ford– named after Mr. Ford’s grandsons – were commissioned in 1920 and would remain in service for over 50 years.

By the 1930s, Ford Motor Company expanded overseas into Europe, Asia, and South America. During this time, Ford purchased 200 surplus World War I merchant vessels from the United States government. Twenty-two were converted to barges, ocean-going ships and canal carriers; the rest were scrapped for the Rouge’s steel furnaces.

Ford US had ships of its own until the early 1990s.