A NEW alliance will see Volkswagen and Ford Company come together to develop commercial vans and medium-sized pickups for global markets beginning as early as 2022.

Aimed at driving scale and efficiency, and allow them to share investment in vehicle architectures, both estimate this co-operation will yield profit by 2023.

The alliance does not entail cross-ownership between the two companies as each have strong commercial van and pick-up businesses, with popular nameplates such as the Ford Transit family and Ranger as well as the Volkswagen Transporter, Caddy and Amarok. Their collective light commercial vehicle volumes from 2018 totalled approximately 1.2m units globally, which would represent the industry’s highest-volume of sales.

Through the alliance, Ford will engineer and build medium-sized pickups for both companies which are expected to go to market as early as 2022. For both parties, Ford intends to engineer and build larger commercial vans for European customers, and Volkswagen intends to develop and build a city van.

They also intend to explore collaborating on autonomous vehicles, mobility services and electric vehicles.