Ford hails van and truck drivers with ‘Backbone of Britain’ marketing campaign

Ford has launched a new advert championing its variety of commercial cars with ‘Backbone of Britain,’ a minute-lengthy birthday celebration of the Transit Van and Ranger choose-up vans. Filmed at the Flintshire Bridge in Wales, the moody sequence culminates in footage of a fleet of motors crossing the Dee Estuary at dusk. The formidable shoot, filmed a remaining month, necessitated the closure of the cable-stayed landmark for 9 hours whilst filming took place, made viable via recent critical protection paintings to the crossing. In a declaration, Ford UK wrote: “Here at Ford, we realize it’s not our vehicles by myself that keep Britain jogging, it’s the people that drive them – you. So from plumbers to plasterers, engineers to electricians, we’re proud to serve folks that serve our kingdom with our new range of Ford Commercial Vehicles for 2019.

marketing campaign
“From the more difficult, smarter new Transit Van to the electrified new Transit Custom Plug-in Hybrid or extraordinarily successful new Ranger select-up, there’s something within the range that’ll serve you.”
The campaign championing Brits comes after Ford Europe chairman Steven Armstrong stated in advance this month that Ford is spending tens of hundreds of thousands of Euros preparing for a probable British exit from the European Union without a change deal, with its plans following the event nevertheless to be decided.
It also follows the promotion of Mandy Dean as UK advertising and marketing director.

For years, the leading companies making electric-powered vans — from transport trucks to pickups to heavy-duty semi-vans — were startups. The multinational giants that make the majority of the diesel-powered vans bring America’s items or help corporations keep infrastructure in large part idled on the sidelines. But in 2019, matters are converting: battery expenses are dropping, and states such as California are ramping up incentives and mandates for zero-emission buses and vehicles. And now, the big truck makers are beginning to make a few more large moves into this marketplace. On Wednesday at the ACT Expo — a huge superior fleet conference in Long Beach, California — the CEO of Daimler Trucks, Roger Nielsen, declared that the beginning of the post-inner combustion engine technology for industrial vehicles is right here. For industrial trucks, “the road to emissions-free using might be driven with the aid of battery electric automobiles,” Nielsen stated.

The statement turned bold and definitive in a world where these OEMs simply had been dabbling with numerous technologies, including natural gasoline, renewable diesel, gas cells, or even propane. Daimler Trucks, for you to have clients checking out 50 or so electric vehicles and buses on roads in the United States by way of the quiet of this 12 months, “is committed” and “this is our destiny,” Nielsen stated. The “truck marketplace” is numerous. Daimler Trucks — the largest commercial heavy-duty truck maker inside the United States with its Freightliner logo — sells loads of hundreds of heavy-duty, magnificence eight vehicles to transport companies and companies with massive hauling fleets every yr. Volvo, Navistar, and Paccar also are big players in this elegant eight truck marketplace.

Shipping corporations that pass items in urban regions, like UPS and Amazon, purchase medium-duty vans (elegance four to 7) just like the Sprinter trucks made with the aid of Mercedes-Benz (a department of Daimler). Companies purchase tens of hundreds of these vehicles in keeping with 12 months in the United States. Then there are pickup vans, which can be sold by organizations and also clients. Particularly in the United States, this stuff is rockstars. They flow thousands and thousands of gadgets in keeping with yr inside the U.S. Market, and Ford on my own offered over a million of its F-series pickup trucks in 2018, or once every 30 seconds.

While transport vans seem to be moving regularly closer to battery strength, the big query mark has been the class 8 heavy-obligation vans. Can batteries pass this type of heavy load a ways distances and meet the desires of shippers?
But Daimler isn’t always the handiest heavy-obligation truck OEM to start embracing battery electric. Volvo Trucks is building 23 heavy-responsibility electric-powered vehicles using a $44.8 million supply from the California Air Resources Board for the South Coast Air Quality Management District. Volvo’s first in North America can be used to move goods at ports and distribution facilities in Southern California. Volvo already makes electric vans and buses for the European marketplace and plans to commercialize them in North America in 2020. Daimler hopes to start production electric-powered vans in a Portland, Oregon, manufacturing facility in 2021.
“We’ve visible a surprising amount of demand from clients [in North America]. They are interested in evaluating this era,” said Keith Brandis, VP of partnerships and strategic solutions with Volvo Group, in an interview with GreenBiz.

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