Ford hired the woman who helped BYD eat its lunch in Europe
If you cannot beat them, hire the person who beat you
Ford has a European problem, and it has just made a very revealing move to fix it. From 1 October, Ford of Europe's sales will be run by Maria Grazia Davino, hired straight from BYD, the Chinese brand whose rapid European rise has come partly at Ford's expense. Poaching the person who helped a rival take your customers is either a smart admission or a slightly awkward one. Probably both.
Who Maria Grazia Davino is
Davino is a serious operator with exactly the CV Ford needs. She spent more than a decade at Stellantis in senior roles, including group managing director and chief executive for Stellantis UK, and oversaw sales and marketing across markets including Germany, Switzerland, Austria and the UK. Since December 2024 she has been regional managing director for BYD in continental Europe, driving the brand's expansion. She takes up the Ford of Europe sales role on 1 October.
The numbers that explain the hire
The context is brutal. In the first half of 2026 Ford registered 192,373 new passenger cars across the EU, EFTA and the UK, down 15.2 percent from 226,954 a year earlier, and its market share slipped to 2.7 percent from 3.3 percent. Over the same period, BYD's European share more than doubled, from 1 percent to 2.4 percent, closing to within touching distance of Ford. One European institution is shrinking while the Chinese newcomer she used to run is surging. That is the whole story in two figures.
The bigger financial picture
The appointment landed alongside a quarterly net loss of 1.3 billion dollars for Ford, a reminder that the pressure is not confined to Europe. Ford has spent recent years restructuring its European business hard, and this is another lever: bring in someone who understands both the old European incumbents, through Stellantis, and the new Chinese challengers, through BYD, and put her in charge of selling.
What Ford wants her to do
Ford frames the hire around its European strategy: strengthening Ford Pro, its commercial-vehicle arm, which is the genuinely healthy part of the business, and expanding the passenger range with five new models by 2029. It is also building an entirely new industrial base on the continent through its joint venture with Geely in Valencia. Davino's job is to turn that product and that plan into registrations, in a market where Ford's passenger cars have been quietly slipping for years.
AutoNext Take
Hiring your rival's growth architect is the corporate equivalent of a very public tactical surrender, and it is also completely the right call. Davino knows precisely how BYD has been winning European customers, because she helped design it, and there is no better person to build Ford's defence than the one who ran the attack. The awkwardness is unavoidable: it is an admission that a storied American-European brand now looks to a Chinese newcomer's playbook for answers, and that Ford's own passenger-car strategy in Europe has not been working.
Whether it works depends on what she is actually given to sell. A brilliant sales chief cannot fix a thin or mispriced range on charisma alone, and Ford's real test is the five new models and the Valencia project behind them. But as a statement of intent, this is a strong one. Ford has stopped pretending the Chinese surge is someone else's problem and hired the person who caused part of it. That is a company that has finally understood the fight it is in.
