The new President of Ford Russia says the Mondeos built here will be as good or better than anything coming off assembly lines in Europe.

Nigel Brackenbury joins the American car giant from Japanese carmaker Mazda, where he is marketing chief.

“We are going to have the locally produced vehicle on sale in 2009. The independence surveys that have been done on the Focuses that we build in Saint-Petersburg. When you benchmark those against Focuses built anywhere else in the world with Ford are absolutely equal quality. And it is the Ford policy to have global quality wherever we build the vehicle and that will be exactly the same strategy on Mondeo: to be as good as or even better than the Mondeos built in the rest of Europe. Everybody can see the way the car market has been developing here very strongly. But I think the local industry is filling the demand for commercial vehicles. The total demand for commercial vehicles here, the increase this year, is actually slightly greater so far that it has been for cars,” said Nigel Brackenbury.