Next year, Ford Motor Co is to move production of its 2016 F-650 and F-750 medium-duty trucks from Mexico to its Ohio Assembly Plant in Avon Lake, near Cleveland. Joe Hinrichs, Ford’s president of the Americas, said that the company is investing $168 million on re-tooling the US factory, which opened in 1974 and currently produces the Ford E-Series range of vans and other commercial vehicles.

Mr Hinrichs added: “Shifting production helps secure a solid future for the dedicated workers at the Ohio facility. Building these trucks in-house will utilise our expertise from our other truck and commercial vehicle lines to give our customers a better product at a competitive price.” The production shift from Mexico is the result of a collective bargaining agreement that Ford and the United Auto Workers negotiated in 2011.

Meanwhile, Ford is expanding its R&D facility in China by increasing its number of employees by more than 50% to around 2,000 by 2018, adding a new building and test track and “broadening the scope of activities”. To date, the company has invested more than $200 million in the facility. The expansion plan involves an additional investment of $100 million.

John Lawler, chief executive of Ford Motor China, described the expansion of its Research and Engineering Center (REC) in the eastern Chinese city of Nanjing as “one of our top global-product-development priorities. Growing the REC — one of eight in our global system — allows our global team to better integrate local customer insight from China and from Ford’s other Asia Pacific markets into product development programmes.”

Ford and its joint ventures in China sold 935,813 vehicles in the country in 2013, up 49% from a year before. Mr. Lawler forecasts that Ford will sell more than 1 million vehicles in China in 2014.