Jiangling is the American company's first shot at full-scale vehicle production, but it still doesn't offer what General Motors, Chrysler, Toyota, Honda and others already have: a passenger-car venture.
When China's auto-industry officials assigned Sun to rescue Jiangling in 1984, the firm had been losing money for a decade and was operating at a wasteful 50% of its capacity--in short, a typical state-owned company.
Meanwhile, turning Jiangling around is not the only challenge faced by the expatriate workers trickling into Ford's Nanchang office.
Unbeknown to Jiangling, a number of Landwind SUVs had been purchased for crash testing by the Allgemeiner Deutscher Automobile Club (ADAC), a prestigious German organization whose rating system has become a widely accepted standard for vehicles sold in Europe.
Unfortunately for Jiangling, this simple modification was only found to be necessary and implemented after the devastating public relations problem that occurred during the Landwind's European market launch.
Within a still-developing country like China the significance of personal transportation, and the untapped creative potential of its business people and technicians, coupled with its openness to new technologies, the opportunity to introduce an entirely paradigm-shifting technology is in many ways greater than now exists in the US and Europe.
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