Al Kammerer, Vehicle Line Director, Medium Cars, Small and Medium Car Center.

"What gives us confidence that we can do it is our success with the Escort," said Al Kammerer, Vehicle Line Director, Medium Cars, Small and Medium Car Center, based in the UK and Germany, and the man who was responsible for product development of the comprehensive Focus range. "The Escort already sells very successfully into markets which include Europe, South America, and India. But we realize that its acceptance on a global basis is probably unique for its class and type." In the U.S., though, the Escort is a noticeably different car to that sold in Europe: longer and with distinctive styling changes. However, the Focus will differ very little between markets. The judgments—commercial, design and engineering—of whether a high volume car can be built for Europe, Asia, and the U.S., is a complex and delicately balanced affair. The Ford Fiesta sells very well in Europe but is deemed too small for the U.S. The Ford Taurus has found success in North America but "looks a little big" for Europe and some other markets. So to attain success, the Focus needed to be pitched very carefully indeed.

"We approached the Focus project by aiming to meet the consumer demands and needs on both sides of the Atlantic," said Kammerer, an American who has spent much of his career with Ford in the U.S. "But that immediately threw up interesting questions, such as the use of control blade rear suspension (for improved handling and packaging with enhanced interior space): Why use it when a typical North American driver is not as sophisticated as a European driver and probably would not appreciate it? Our response is that even though they may not recognize why they like driving the car, they do enjoy driving it, and that the overall cost of providing the incremental function and ride characteristic facilitated by the control blade system—a surprise-and-delight item—can be amortized as an engineering expense. Quite simply, it gives us a better all-around business deal. It is also something market-led by Europe that will benefit drivers in North America. The flip side is that although interior space is appreciated in Europe and Asia, it is not always at the top of purchase reasons as it is in the U.S., where most people buy vehicles on the basis of price per cubic foot of interior volume: to them, bigger is better," he said.

The design decision to give the Focus a height of 4 ft 7 in. (1430 mm) is a definite plus for the U.S. market, although the car looks tall in the European road environment. "We also have to consider that the 95th percentile man around whom we do all our package work, will be 10 mm taller in 2000 than in 1990," Kammerer said. "People are getting larger and taller—and they also live longer." So the added height of the international Focus not only adds to its appeal in North America and allows for the increase in size of the average male frame, but also helps facilitate access to the vehicle for older people.

The Focus will, of course, need detail modification to meet individual market needs, such as bigger bumpers for the U.S. Some of these changes are to satisfy legislative requirements, others are down to customer expectations. But Kammerer sees the U.S. as the toughest market—not because of its emissions and crashworthiness requirements, which the Focus was designed to meet from its conception, but because " consumers do not tell us what they want."

Kammerer elaborated: "Because they spend a lot of their time in cars, the Japanese study and understand them more deeply. Typically, if you have a market ride or research event, or show a car to Japanese customers or potential customers, they can articulate what they like and don't like. But things are very difficult when a consumer cannot tell you what they like or don't like, which is the U.S. case. Americans can be fussy about car design and capability—but it's a case of, ''I"ll know it when I see it.' It is one reason why the North American car industry has fallen behind in some attributes versus the European or Japanese, where their home markets are that much more demanding."

A major element in allowing high-volume producers to meet global requirements is the adoption of a common platform philosophy. "We will see what I call fundamental architectures becoming increasingly common around the world, but the execution of vehicles on those platforms will be very different in terms of trying to satisfy various elements such as fashion statements," Kammerer said. At present designs coming out of Detroit studios are very different to those in Europe but he feels it will be interesting to see how quickly styles and design cues migrate as the number of serious global players increases.

The engineering challenges of creating global cars are enormous, but emissions and crashworthiness remain at the top of the list. Said Kammerer: "They are both about equal in priority due to the uniqueness of markets around the world. From a tooling lead-time viewpoint, crashworthiness is very difficult because you have to get into the fundamental body structure issue. It becomes very costly. Computer aided engineering (CAE) capability in the crashworthiness environment has moved along very quickly so we can go through a number of iterations to improve correlation but there are more and more requirements to look to."

In Europe there is what Kammerer describes as the "subjective element" of the NCAP (Euro-New Car Assessment Program) tests. This is a consumer program to provide information about the safety of individual car models; it calculates an overall rating for occupant protection, on a scale from zero to four stars, based on the results of two crash tests: an offset frontal impact and a side impact. Commented Kammerer: "From a market driven rather than a regulatory perspective Europe is starting to lead on crashworthiness issues. These 'public domain' tests in my view surpass what is demanded in the U.S. You can meet all European requirements and still only get one star in an NCAP test."

In fact, Focus has recently achieved four stars in NCAP tests and gained two stars for pedestrian safety. But Kammerer does believe that the commonization of crash tests across the world just might be achieved: "Work is now under way to commonize test dummy procedures. The problem with global crash tests, though, is the size of the vehicles that might be involved. In the U.S., vehicles are considerably bigger and heavier than in Europe." He is even more cautious about emissions legislation commonality: "A global standard is possible but a prerequisite would be a global standard on fuel quality. Several years ago, California went to a formulated level of gasoline which is quite clean; in Europe that has not happened." The Focus will be offered with a 2.0-L gasoline engine for the U.S. and Europe: "But it is pretty well a ground up calibration for each market." These variations of standards in the two key areas of crashworthiness and emissions increase both R&D time and time to market, unavoidably building in cost.

As for styling harmonization, Kammerer believes that is not likely. The platform commonality that is now very much a part of Ford's planning (as it is with other manufacturers such as Volkswagen), will allow many different styles, and these will be required by national markets. He does not subscribe to the thinking that styles could be distilled down to three or four basic shapes: "I see a proliferation of body shapes for all markets, not a narrowing down — but always on a limited number of platforms."