Ford Investing £181 Million in Wales Engine Plant

Ford will spend £181 million ($275 million) at its Bridgend Engine Plant in South Wales, U.K., to manufacture a family of all-new, technologically advanced, fuel-efficient gasoline engines with production to start in late 2018.

The project also gets Welsh government funding of £14.67 million ($22.2 million) and an annual training grant of £50,000 ($80,000).

The investment will preserve more than 750 skilled jobs at the plant.

The Bridgend facility has received a total £1.8 billion ($2.75 billion) investment since it opened in 1980. It builds 4-, 6- and 8-cyl. engines at a rate of 3,400 units a day, or one every 24 seconds off the busiest line.

Its products power the Ford Fiesta, B-Max, Focus, C-Max, Kuga and Mondeo models.

Teams from the Ford Dunton Technical Center in Essex, England, as well as Ford’s Technical Center in Merkenich, Germany, and the Ford Research and Innovation Center in Aachen, Germany, worked together on the design and development of the all-new engine family.

Earlier this year, Ford built its 5 millionth vehicle worldwide equipped with a fuel-efficient EcoBoost gasoline engine.

In Europe more than one of every four Ford vehicles sold are fitted with an EcoBoost engine. The 1.0L engine is the most popular EcoBoost version in Europe, with one-in-five vehicles sold in the region being equipped with the engine.