Ford is planning to lay off thousands of workers in order to save expenses and accelerate the transition to electric vehicles, according to US media.

According to the Wall Street Journal, which quoted people close to the situation, the organization is anticipated to announce the termination of more than 4,000 employees in the coming weeks.

The article explained that factory workers will be unaffected. According to Bloomberg, up to 8,000 jobs could be disrupted.

A Ford spokesperson did not want to comment on "speculation", but the group has scheduled a conference call on Thursday to give an update on its plan to transform to electric vehicles.

"Key Ford executives will provide details on how the company is building out its industrial system to reach a global production run rate of 600,000 EVs, growing to more than 2 million EV annual global run rate by 2026," the company said in a statement.  

"As we've said lots of times, to deliver our Ford+ transformation and lead an exciting and disruptive new era of electric and connected vehicles, we're reshaping our work and modernizing our organization across all of the automotive business units and the entire company," the spokesperson said in his message.  

"We've laid out clear targets for our cost structure so that we're lean and fully competitive with the best in the industry."  

In response to competition from Tesla and other start-ups, major automakers have increased the manufacturing of electric vehicles in recent years. Ford Modele, a new dedicated organization, was announced by Ford in March.

It started at the time that it hoped to produce two million electric vehicles per year by 2026, accounting for one-third of its total production and it planned to invest $50 billion in them. The company's leaders also stated that they planned to reduce traditional car spending to $3 billion per year.

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