Ford's Premier Automotive Group, which includes Jaguar and Land Rover, crashed $740m into the red last year to the open disappointment of its US parent.
PAG made a loss of $255m (£136m) in the last quarter of 2004 compared with a profit of $114m in the same period in 2003 with Ford blaming a combination of the weakness of the dollar and falling sales at Jaguar.
"We are not happy with the results at PAG, there is a lot of work to do," Ford's chief financial officer Don Leclair said yesterday.
Ford has already announced that it will cut 1,150 jobs and end car production at Jaguar's Browns Lane plant in Coventry as it seeks to realign its production capacity with scaled back sales targets.
Yesterday the company said that it would have to set aside $75m next year to cover the cost of switching Browns Lane production to Castle Bromwich.
That is on top of almost $100m of costs already clocked up through job cuts at Jaguar and Land Rover and changes at the Halewood and Browns Lane plants.
Ford did not give a detailed breakdown of the losses at Jaguar but the UK company has already admitted they will run into hundreds of millions of pounds.
Elsewhere in Europe there was better news for the US car company with Ford Europe turning 2003's $1bn loss into a profit of $114m.
Overall, Ford said it had made a profit of $104m in the fourth quarter of 2004 compared with a near $800m loss in the same period in 2003.
For the year as a whole, Ford earned a profit of $5.8bn, some $2.4bn ahead of 2003.
The main driving force, however, was not the automotive business which produced profits of $850m, but a record performance from the group's financial services operations which made a profit of $5bn.
"On a fundamental basis, like General Motors, Ford continues to give away cars and make it up on the financing," Merrill Lynch analyst John Casesa said.
Ford chairman and chief executive officer Bill Ford said: "In 2004 our company gained momentum, delivering more revenue and earnings, more new products and more innovative breakthroughs. We also confronted operating challenges with our Jaguar brand and high industry marketing costs."
