Ford is cutting thousands of jobs as it cuts $3 billion in costs associated with conventional cars

Challenged by Tesla and other start-ups, traditional carmakers have accelerated production of their electric models in recent years.

The restructuring announced by Ford includes 2,000 permanent jobs and 1,000 contractors, mostly in the United States, Canada and India, but it does not affect factory workers, according to a company spokesman, told AFP.

And US media reported in July that Ford, which employs about 182,000 people around the world, was preparing to cut thousands of jobs.

“We’ve got too many people in certain places, there’s no doubt about that,” company president Jim Farley said in July.

“We have skills that are no longer useful… and we have jobs that should be changed,” he added, without specifying the number of jobs that would be abolished.

The company has previously stated that it intends to spend $50 billion on electric vehicles by 2026.

And it announced in March that it intends to cut costs associated with conventional vehicles by up to $3 billion a year.

The spokesman said the job cuts announced on Monday “consist with what we’ve been describing for a while” and are aimed at making Ford “more efficient.”