Ford is building an electric car based on the R5: is the Fiesta about to make a comeback?

Ford has found a way to quickly launch two affordable electric cars. An electric Fiesta, if you will, at first. It'll be a Ford design, but based on the Renault Ampr platform (that's the R5 and R4), and be built by Renault's factory in Northern France.

Expect the car to go on sale in just over two years, in early 2028. Such speed is possible because the plant and platform are already up and running. Also, building in France, with the possibility of Renault's local battery production, will help with whatever grants and tariffs Britain and European countries are imposing at the time.

Ford is keen to point out it will have Ford driving characteristics and Ford's digital interface. This means it will be more different to the R5 than is the Nissan Micra – also built at Renault's plant.

The co-operation with Renault announced today actually talks of two models for 2028. Ford is refusing to say yet what the second car will be. Indeed it's also officially not saying the first car will be a supermini, but our source didn't push back on our suggestion that this is the most necessary and obvious car to start with.

The obvious second EV would be a crossover. The Puma Gen-E will be just four years old by then, but the underlying Puma petrol car will be nine years old by 2028 so it's possible Ford would replace the Puma Gen-E with a car on the Ampr platform and the petrol Puma with a car made in its own factories. It's built in Romania at the moment.

Indeed the announcement isn't just about electric cars. "A new generation of multi-energy vehicles will arrive starting in 2028," it said.

It's possible that all of this means Ford is finally developing a strategy to reverse years of decline in its car range in Europe. Filling in the affordable EV gap is an urgent priority but by no means the only one. Focus manufacturing has ended, leaving it with a chaotic and badly threadbare range.

The cheapest are the Puma (hybrid and electric), then Kuga (petrol, hybrid and PHEV), the Mustang sports car, a set of different-sized adapted Transit people-carriers, and no fewer than three biggish EV crossovers – the Explorer, Capri and Mustang Mach E.

Gaps are painful: no city car, no supermini with either ICE or EV drive, no mid-size hatch, no estate, no bigger petrol/diesel crossover.

It will also need an EV between the Puma and Explorer. It's possible – though again unconfirmed – that it might use the new Ford EV platform being developed by a Ford engineering group led by Doug Field (former chief of Apple's car project). That is at least a couple of years later than the Renault co-operation though, and there's no commitment to invest for it at the Ford Valencia, Spain, plant that builds the Kuga.

It's striking that although Ford used the VW MEB platform for the Explorer and Capri, it isn't extending that VW co-operation into small cars, even though VW is close to production on small EVs. The Explorer and Capri are built at a Ford plant in Cologne, Germany and aren't selling as fast as Ford hoped. The plant recently lost a shift and laid off workers. It would need extra investment to build smaller electric Fords there, so perhaps having Renault build them was a lower-risk option.

Part of Ford's problem is that although its light van and pickup dealers are doing very well, a lot of the car dealers have swapped to incoming Chinese brands. And with fewer shops you sell fewer cars. Ford simply has less presence than it did, and has shown disloyalty to its Fiesta and Focus customers. Will they flock back?

Today's announcement is very thin on specific details of the cars, and indeed says they won't be all-Ford cars. But it does at least say there will be new Ford cars in Europe. For a while it looked like we'd mostly be getting vans with windows.