The future of the Ford Fusion in the U.S. just got murkier. Barely a month after word got out of the Fusion’s unsteady future in the U.S., a new report from The Detroit News paints a cloudier future for Ford’s best-selling U.S. sedan. According to the report, Ford is canceling the redesign program for the mid-size sedan. More importantly, the automaker is said to be reevaluating the future of the model in our shores, effectively throwing the status of the Fusion in a state of limbo.

The alarm bells started ringing a month ago when Automotive News reported about Ford’s concerns with the Fusion’s sales volume in the last couple of years. While it’s still regarded as the company’s best-selling U.S. sedan, sales of the Fusion have fallen by as much as 22 percent in the last year alone. The relatively poor result has, in some ways, become a microcosm of the entire sedan market, which is slowly being swallowed up the rise in popularity of the crossover and SUV segments.

This new report puts the sedan in an even bigger spotlight because it’s talking about canceling the redesign program altogether. Granted, this kind of step isn’t new in the auto industry, so it doesn’t mean that Ford is killing off the Fusion nameplate entirely. The company could be buying some time to discuss what options it has moving forward.

Still, it doesn’t bode well for the sedan when its scheduled redesign has been put on the shelves. It doesn't help that another Ford sedan -- the Taurus -- has a cloudy future of its own. The bigwigs at Ford will have a big decision on their hands to determine the fate of its top-selling sedan in the U.S. It’s already been established that the company won’t build the sedan in its Mexico facility and won’t export it from China. Whatever options Ford has left is going to determine whether the Fusion still has a future in the U.S.

References

Ford Fusion

Read our full review on the 2017 Ford Fusion.

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