Motor trend is a bit tardy as those changes were made a year ago. 

High volume mainstream vehicles don't sell on passion they sell on price and value.  You can't sell 300k Mavericks unless you sell them below cost.  The solution is to have good passionate products that are profitable at 100k to 150k and combine those in factories where you can adjust the mix to match demand.

Developing A and B-sized hatches in Europe does not make any money. Those vehicles are there to get people attracted to a brand and to move them up eventually into vehicles that make a profit.    Renault will likely be losing its partnerships soon with Nissan-Mitsubishi. It has already lost its partnerships with Mercedes and FCA. It makes sense for Renault to partner with another company since auto reviews have raved about the new 4 and 5. They have a good product and need more volume.    Ford can't develop small EVs on its own since it does not make any profit. Renault is the perfect partner.    Bigger question - Would this be the first Ford produced in France since they sold off what would become Simca?

Ok I fixed it by turning off auto-correct.  If you choose the word without the quote twice it wont try to add it any more but then you have to do ot for every single word.  Ridiculous.  Should be part of smart punctuation

This is why the race to the bottom in terms of sales volume, and the complete disregard for it by Ford leadership was such a troubling decision imo. I really like their strategy of focusing on icons, and passion products, and not just making commodity products. But I wish they used that as inspiration to rethink mainstream models instead of abandon them.    It seems like they're starting to reverse this trend now with attention to passenger cars coming back into focus. 

Clearly there is a ton of cheap Chinese junk for sale, but there are also good products that just happen to be built in China.

I hope it's just a stop gap as I and others have theorized. A way to get into the market quickly, and to gauge the demand for these sorts of cars before they go all in with their own platform in that region. That's the only way this makes sense. 

I almost never have to charge my phone in the car.  Then again I don't use CarPlay or use it for navigation.

There might also be some other reciprocal agreement we don't know about.

ORRRRR.......... the investment required to do it from scratch for a product with low ATPs and low margins that can't be sold in the US was too much and the ROI too low.   They blew it by not developing a cheap small car platform 20 years ago.