RichardJensen

Yep. My grandfather (from Saginaw, Michigan) used to say "we must be in South Dakota, the wind just picked up" whenever he came out to visit us. Of course we explain it thus: It's always windy here because Minnesota sucks & Wyoming blows.

That would kind of stand to reason, though. Wouldn't it? I mean the greatest load on the engine is going to be launching from a dead stop, and you'd expect a diesel to have a lot more torque right off idle than a conventional gas engine. I'd guess you could match the 5th wheel capability w/one or two extra low gears.

350 hp in an E-Series. Three hundred and fifty horsepower in an E-Series. (Insert appropriate 'back in my day' quote about 1980s engines.)

I think bzcat was just saying that the MME would be built at a VW plant. As it's also going to be sold stateside, and is already under development, it's not going to use a VW architecture.

Curious, then, that Ford's been the engineering lead on the past two JV RWD transmissions.

I tend to think they'll offer a smaller displacement engine for a very simple reason: The incremental cost of building a smaller displacement engine will be more than made up for by the premium that they'll charge to upgrade to the 7.3. Having a smaller engine gives them a means of raising the ATP.

The 7.3 block almost certainly supports lower displacements, so I would expect the 6.2L to be replaced with a similar displacement derived from the 7.3

Interesting. Around here they have a saying: "He's a Ph.D …. Poppa had a Dealership."

I dunno. I think Ford's rationale for the F-600 makes a lot of sense: Form factor. I think the new Chevy MDs have the same issue that the last GM MDs had: The truck is just too big, physically, for lighter duty applications. From that standpoint, I think Ford's going in the opposite direction: They've beefed up a F-550, which has more of a conventional pickup cab/engine compartment/frame, so you get 22k GVWR from a pickup, basically.

I'm curious how Ford's MD sales break down---how many are sales to new vs. existing customers, how many are sold via bidding process, and to what extent Ford is interested in chasing individual sales. I mean, it's obvious on the retail side that Ford is going to spend millions in order to sell cars one at a time to individual households, but what's their budget to reach a guy who buys a new MD every eight years or so? And, even at that, what's the most effective way of communicating with these customers? Is it via media, or is it good ol' fashioned networking? I have a suspicion that Ford dealers' commercial sales reps stay in their jobs for quite a while and develop long-term relationships with their counterparts at larger businesses. If that's the case, it might be more effective to have some sales rep pay for a meal & talk up the 7.3 with a good customer than running ads in a trade magazine?

Also: It's worth observing that Ford's savings consists entirely of the difference in interest rates between what they'd have gotten on the market in 2009 vs. what they got from the Feds. And even calculating those savings isn't straightforward. Odds are pretty high that if Ford had gotten unfavorable terms in 2009, they would have been able to refinance when the company & economy recovered, at rates that were more comparable to what they got from the Feds.

Yep. They basically got the feds to subsidize production shifts that the market was clamoring for anyway...

Heh. I wonder if they've paid off the low interest loan they got from the Feds for retooling MAP for the Focus: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ford-opens-flexible-green-michigan-assembly-plant-with-production-of-all-new-ford-focus-118182259.html It's amusing that Ford got a discounted loan for switching to a more fuel efficient product, and less than a decade later, they're switching back to a less fuel efficient product. Plus ca change, I guess....

Nifty. They even included a picture of Tesla's truck (10)

Rugged utilities might be Expy/Explorer/Everest?

One of the things that I'm curious about with EPLM is how it integrates with existing P&L silos. F'r instance, say you're the EPLM director for the Escape: To what extent are you going to get dinged over poor performance in, say, South America, when there are issues in SA that apply to the entire business unit? Or, say, you've got a product like the Mustang, being built in an under utilized plant. That's going to raise your per-unit costs significantly, but you're not in a position to move new product to the plant. I mean, they'll have to come up with some pretty sophisticated accounting methods to back out structural costs from these products (and based on my indirect experience w/large corporations, upper management is going to see very little of the kludge work required to comply with this new reporting method).

Right--which would explain most of, if not all of the bump for the 3.5L, but the 2.3L jumps disproportionately: 2,300lbs vs. the 3.5L's 600lbs.

I thought the EcoBoost 2.3 got the 6F50/55?

I think what bzcat was referring to wasn't so much the plant's ability to flex as the contract's ability to flex.

Maybe? But you'd think that would bump up tow rating across the board. Of course, if the 2.3 could pass every test except the launch on grade, they wouldn't pass the test...

Implementation is key. If you go to an extreme w/EPLM, you get problems similar to what happened when Ford split apart SUVs & trucks in the early 00s, and the Expy & Explorer ended up with significantly less parts sharing w/the F-Series, with minimal benefit to the consumer.

Here are the outgoing & incoming gear ratios. What do you make of them? 1 2 3 4 5 6 R Final drive 4.484 2.872 1.842 1.414 1.000 0.742 2.88 2.77, 3.16, 3.39 4.6957 2.9851 2.1462 1.7690 1.5201 1.2700 1.0000 0.8536 0.6892 0.6357 If the assumption is that the bulk of the demand on the powertrain comes at launch, are we looking at a higher tow rating based primarily on the first gear? Also, I wonder how much those three overdrive gears do to improve highway mileage.

Ah, I read '600lbs more' as '6000lbs' when I was looking at the press package.

One of the things that surprised me about the CD6 Explorer was the significantly higher max towing, and I'm curious about the extent to which that impacted programming for the model.

Another thought: If you assume that the same size family purchases both Expys and Explorers, then the price gap allows Ford to sell more high end Explorers vs. fewer lower priced Expys? In my head, an Explorer/Expy is a target vehicle for a 4-5 person family, and a crew cab might overlap that a bit, but I think 3rd row seating is a 'must have' for a majority of Expy/Explorer customers. I come by this thinking based on experience w/my own extended fam, where one sister w/2 nearly full grown kids bought an Expedition L and another with three kids traded off a standard Expy for a Tahoe (boo!) In both cases, the 3rd row/additional covered cargo space was considered a necessity.