Ford Highway: the road that Puma built

The Ford Puma, the UK’s best-selling car last year, has survived as the brand’s only small car for one good reason: it’s built in the cost-effective eastern European country of Romania.

But while lower wages help keep the Puma both cheap enough to attract buyers and profitable enough not to consign it to the same fate as the Fiesta or Focus, Romania is a hard grind compared to production in Germany.

The factory in the south-eastern city of Craiova wasn’t originally Ford’s. It started in 1976 as a joint venture between the communist government and Citroën to build Oltcit versions of the Visa, running quirky air-cooled boxer engines.

Following the collapse of the Ceausescu regime, Daewoo bought the plant in 1994 and built the Matiz and other models there until finances ran out.

When General Motors bought the rump of the Korean company in 2002, it decided it didn’t want Craiova, so it sat idle until 2008, when Ford took it over.

Ford first built the Transit Connect, then the B-Max and Ecosport there, but it wasn’t until the smash-hit Puma entered production that the Craiova really found its stride – perhaps for first time ever.

Last year, it made around 250,000 examples of the Puma and related Transit/Tourneo Courier – a record for the plant. The UK is Craiova’s largest single export destination. 

Now the factory has just started building electric versions of both models, finally giving Ford a lower-priced EV to help it comply with the UK's ZEV mandate.

One reason GM might not have wanted Craiova is the awkward location and poor infrastructure. Like much of southern Romania, the city is blocked off from the rest of Europe by the Southern Carpathian mountain range, which is short of decent road passes. Some, like the snaking Transfăgărăsan - made famous by a Top Gear episode - are shut during winter.

Even the fertile flatlands linking Pitesti (stop-off to the mountains and home of Dacia Duster production) and Craiova 75 miles to the west lacked decent roads, with average speeds of around 40mph, due to Romania’s endemic traffic jams.

Getting parts in and cars out is tough work in these conditions, which is why Ford has waged a long and persistent campaign to get the Romanian government to fund roads up to the tasking of shipping Pumas, starting with the Craiova-Pitesti section. 

Now, 17 years later, the persistence has paid off, with the recent opening of a brand spanking motorway-style dual carriageway knocking at least an hour off the journey.

Its official name is DEx12, except no one calls it that: this is the Ford Highway.

“After the Transylvanian highway and Moldovan highway, it’s the third highway in Romania with a name,” Romanian prime minster Marcel Ciolacu joked during a ceremony on 14 March marking the opening of order books for the Puma Gen-E, E-Transit Courier and E-Tourneo Courier.

“I think [the name] stuck after all our nagging to get it completed,” said Jo Payne, deputy general manager of Ford Otosan, the Turkish joint venture with Koç Holding that bought Craiova in 2022.

Koç’s ram logo is now prominent over the management building.

Payne, a Brit who is also a regular finalist in Autocar's Great Women in British Automotive initiative, oversaw production at Craiova for five years before moving to Turkey and said that lobbying a succession of transport ministers for better roads was a key task she inherited from her predecessor. Politics is unavoidable when you’re the country’s second largest exporter by value (after the Renault Group).

The Romanian government promised the road in return for extra investment in Craiova and Ford has held up its end of the bargain, most recently with £420 million spent to increase capacity to 300,000 to build Couriers and carve out space for a battery assembly area for EVs.

Ford’s initial plan was to install capacity for 150,000 battery packs a year, but that has been dialled back to 50,000 after marketing deemed that demand was short of initial estimates.

“That was planned three to four years ago when everybody was excited,” said Dan Ghirisan, head of vehicle manufacturing at Craiova.

The facility is however purposefully flexible to ramp up production again when EV sales build – something that will help Ford’s factory at Halewood, which builds electric drive units for Craiova's EVs.

Roads aren’t the only transport option open to Ford. The communists may have saddled the plant with a tricky location, but they did unfailingly build rail connections to their biggest industrial locations, and Ford takes full advantage, shipping around 60% of vehicles out of the plant on trains. 

UK-bound vehicles mainly track across Europe to the Netherlands, where they take a boat. Production heading to southern Europe and Turkey – the Couriers' biggest market - mainly goes by rail to the Black Sea and on by ship. 

Ghirisan prefers his vehicles to take the train rather than a lorry. “It’s a lot cheaper, and better for the environment,” he says.

When your paint shop uses as much gas in a day as Craiova’s population of 350,000 burn at home cooking breakfast, lunch and dinner, you take your emission wins where you can.

Again, however, Romania’s creaking transport infrastructure counts against it. Payne remembers chiding one government official that she could cycle to the border faster than the train, which she reckoned averaged a speed of around 8mph. 

The rail speed has since improved, and now there’s also the road to Pitesti. Next is just the small matter of building a motorway over the Carpathians to link Craiova to the much faster EU network beginning in Hungary – a feat as big as driving the M6 through Cumbria or the I-70 through the Rockies.

The latest finish estimate is 2028. Then Craiova will truly be connected. Ford Otosan talks about the “opportunity for future growth” at the plant.

As Europe’s car manufacturers continue to head to the continent’s east in search of cost advantages, Ford’s 2008 gamble could end up playing a lot bigger part in restoring its damaged European finances.