Gird Your Loins, People - Ford Promises an Affordable Vehicle of Some Description Within Three Years

“Ford’s future is not about giving up the car,” company CEO Jim Hackett said in November 2017, not long before taking an axe to all Ford passenger car models, save the Mustang.

“We want to give them what they’re telling us they really want. We’re simply reinventing the American car,” Hackett continued in May of 2018, adding, “We don’t want anyone to think we’re leaving anything. We’re just moving to a modern version. This is an exciting new generation of vehicles coming from Ford.”

A year on from that last statement, the Ford Focus and Taurus are dead, the Fiesta bites the dust next month, and the Fusion lives on borrowed time. Also dead is the promise that the mildly lifted, faux-crossover Focus Active would make its way here from overseas. What’s left? A new product promise, and a long wait.

Rumors abound about what Ford might bring to the table in the wake of its car cull. Perhaps a wagony/crossover-type vehicle bearing the Fusion name; perhaps something completely different.

Speaking at the Bank of America Merrill Lynch 2019 Auto Summit in New York Wednesday, Ford’s vice president of enterprise product line management, Jim Baumbick, offered a spark of hope for loyal Ford customers of modest means who aren’t at all interested in an EcoSport.

By 2022, Baumbick said, Ford will offer Americans an “affordable” new vehicle to make up for the company’s lost car lineup, Automotive News reports.

Sadly, Baumbick didn’t elaborate on the upcoming model’s bodystyle or size, and neither did Ford when contacted by the publication. There was, however, some boasting about what a nimble company Ford has become.

“It’s an example of how we’re moving faster, working together differently and leveraging our five all-new flexible vehicle architectures,” the automaker said in a statement. “We came up with the concept in just 12 weeks using our new product creation process. Previous all-new vehicles could have taken years of research before receiving approval.”

Be that as it may, a company that presumably wishes to court the low-priced buyer probably wouldn’t leave such a glaring gap in its lineup for so long. There will be a multi-year window in which Ford sells zero vehicles with an after-destination base MSRP below $20,000. New product will arrive in the interim, yes, but the 2020 Escape and its yet-unreleased “Baby Bronco” sibling are not entry-level vehicles.

There’s also a legitimately compact, unibody pickup on the way, likely carrying the Courier name, but such a vehicle doesn’t seem to fit the bill of a Fiesta and Focus replacement. Nor does it seem likely that its price will overlap with that of Ford’s discontinued compacts. The speculation continues.

Meanwhile, Baumbick did say that the upcoming 2020 Ford electric crossover (named Mach E, it seems) will birth a better-performing variant. Interesting, as the basic Mach E is supposed to be quite the hot little number, per Ford’s claims.

[Image: Ford Motor Company/ Twitter]