I think there's a bit of oversimplification on this last paragraph, because they were anticipating BEV replacements on a far more accelerated timeline than what has actually happened.

@Biker16 analysis shows what a strategy mistake it was to sell Mazda and Volvo.    Alan Mularly was right to sell Jaguar and Land Rover and Aston Martin. The English brands were an endless money drain without a lot of product synergy with Ford. But it made little strategic sense to sell Mazda and Volvo - this is probably (still) an unpopular thing to say out loud but Ford probably should have held on to Mazda and Volvo and declared bankruptcy like GM. Mazda and Volvo products were highly complementary and Ford really needed the size and scale of Mazda and Volvo to be compete effectively in EMEA and APAC. Without those subsidiaries (which were actually the main source of vehicle developments outside North America), Ford eventually had to pay the price of reduced economy of scale. And let's not forget, Mazda becoming a Toyota controlled affiliate is not a good outcome, and Geely probably won't be what it is today (a global powerhouse) without Volvo... Ford basically helped strengthen Toyota and created Geely as a globally relevant competitor. Big blunders in retrospect.    From C1 to C2, you can see how disastrous the lack of scale is to Ford's business. The thing about shrinking your product offering is that it is rarely the solution to the underlying problem. Ford decided to axe supposedly unprofitable nameplates but in the age of platform sharing and common architecture, those decisions end up impacting the supposedly profitable nameplates down the road. Once you are on the path to shrink, there is only one logical outcome...you keep shrinking because each one becomes less profitable.    For example, Ford may not have made a lot of money on Fusion/Mondeo but it probably did make plenty of money on Edge and Nautilus. But getting rid of Fusion means Ford couldn't afford to keep supply chain in North America for another generation of Edge and Nautilus - meanwhile in China, Ford kept the Mondeo and that probably was the difference in why Edge and Nautilus are still in production there (they are not big sellers in China either... in fact, Ford barely exists in China now - another serious of strategic blunders to discuss for another time). Similarly, Ford struggled to make the math work on another gen of Kuga/Escape but that was entirely predictable (especially in Europe and APAC) when it decided to pulled the plug on Focus. These products need each other to sustain C2 economy of scale.          

R-perez?

I think a lot of it came from Bill Ford too.  That's one of the reasons Fields was let go, because the EV investment wasn't enough.

This is almost as entertaining as the EV evangelist that was banned. Can't you please de-ban him?  It would be fascinating to hear what he has to say about the EV retrenchment. 

I can change the cabin filter in a cd3 fusion in 90 seconds with no tools.  Cd4 fusion takes a screwdriver and 15 minutes.   cd4 had to be beefed up to support ecoboost 2.7 and 3.0 power and it supported plug in hybrids.  Build quality suffered a lot starting with the headlights before cd4 fusion even launched.  They were shipping cars to flat rock to fix them then shipping them back to hermosillo.  Hermosillo went from #1 in quality to nowhere near that overnight.  And it wasn't the workers.   C2 was built to only support I4s.  As such it has more in common with C1 than CD4.

Yeah.  The Fusion never went away; it moved to C2, just like the Taurus, Edge, MKz, and the Nautilus.  These vehicles are still in production. 

Did you expect CD4 to be less complex than a 10-year-old platform? How is C2 superior? 

You might want to reread my post...

Again, CD4 included more than the fusion.