RichardJensen

I think this is something of a generational bias: The Silent Generation basically created the hot-rod scene, and their kids, Gen X, have been decidedly less enthusiastic about cars, but because both generations are significantly smaller than Baby Boomers & Millennials, the fall-off in interest is suddenly drawing comment. Also, the fall-off is being exaggerated by people who earn their living talking about change.

We've been grouching about Ford's market cap since I signed up in like 2004.

I have read it. It does not explain ​why "market cap is an important measure." It's merely an assortment of other unsupported statements.

Enlighten me. Why is market cap an "important measure" of a company's health? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Books-a-Million https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadcast.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberian_Outpost https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EToys.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeoCities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Crossing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inktomi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InfoSpace https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pets.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VerticalNet If you are not old enough to speak from experience, then you are advised to learn your history before posting.

Do you, and I ask this in all seriousness, believe that market cap is a valuable measure of the health of a company?

Doing everything themselves seems to be working out real well for them in terms of profits, quality, productivity and worker health.

Right, you have the highest rates in the country because your state's laws are anomalous, not normal. To me, the disingenuousness of IIHS's campaigns is irksome. They are doing this to save their members money, and that's fine--until they start lecturing us about how they are all about making things safer. That's bull crap, and it is so embedded in their propaganda campaign it's part of their name. Be honest. Don't take my money and act like you're doing me a favor.

The flaw with your logic is the rate of claims paid. Yes, injury claims are far more expensive than vehicle damage, but they occur in a vanishingly small percentage of accidents. There may be a thousand property damage-exclusive accidents for every one injury claim, and if you figure even an average of $2,500 in property damage claims, that's $2.5M in property damage claims for every injury accident amounting to, what? on average? $25k? Bearing in mind, also, that most people are only carrying mandatory minimums which cap insurance company payouts. Yes, these headlights are more expensive, but the difference in cost is marginal when you're looking at the front end damage caused by a deer. The IIHS is all about saving insurance companies money. It was never really about saving lives, that was just a happy side effect of lowered claims. And now, this is almost 100% about reducing property damage claims.

Also, drivers used to sprint across to their cars. If memory serves, Ken Miles walked slowly and deliberately over to his to reflect his disdain for the "Le Mans Start"

Expecting a guy like Neil to write coherently and defensibly is like expecting orange juice from a rain cloud. Of course he's not going to write about Ford. He's going to grab a hot take that doesn't make any sense and throw a crappy column together around it. Here's a bit of time travel for you:

Dan Neil is the automotive equivalent of those guys that do sports talk radio and say stuff just to make people mad. As far as racing goes, F1 hasn't been relevant to production cars in maybe two decades or more. Same story with Indycar. Nascar hasn't been relevant in maybe 30 years--at least not since Nascar started punishing Ford for building production cars that were too aerodynamic. All of these series are now so specialized and so tightly governed that, along with computer modeling and rapid prototyping, there's just little opportunity/need to prove new ideas in a racing series.

Oh lord. You mean Chevy actually put together that skin crawlingly bad bit of Millennial pandering for real? wow.

If I had a house, I'd definitely go with solar panels, but then, I can afford them. There's no Henry Ford for reducing your electric costs--or your transportation costs. Are you struggling to make ends meet? Yeah, well, this thing that will lower your electric bill to almost nothing? You can't afford it. Sorry.

Yes -- the solar roof panels. What a great way to make electric cars affordable for people who can afford electric cars! Those things do diddly-squat for people that are poor or in marginal conditions. Every single thing about this whole stupid business is about making life cheaper/simpler for people who can already afford things just fine. Having trouble getting by? Yeah, well this stuff ain't for you. The Model S? "Look at me! Look how environmentally responsible I am with my 4,000 SF house, that I keep at 72 degrees all summer long!!!! My car plugs in!" Man, I must just be really cranky this week. Nothing personal, silvrsvt, just gets under my skin to see people with huge environmental footprints patting themselves on the back for owning a Tesla and using solar panels to charge it. It's like getting a Diet Coke with your big mac value meal.

VW is to Germany what Chase, Citi or Goldman Sachs are to the US: Too Big To Fail. And if you think running a TBTF concern does anything other than foster moral hazard and other forms of irresponsible behavior..........

Just had to get that rant out of my system :D I mean, sometimes I swear people have no idea how big the United States is. It's not just your neighborhood and that one suburb you go to some of the time and your parents' house. Three hundred and twenty million people. Three trillion miles driven annually. Dang near three million square miles in the lower 48. We're not talking about some new app for your phone that can be slapped together by underpaid H1 visa holders or off-shored to Bangalore. We're talking about over a quarter billion vehicles driving on almost four million miles of road. Just because you sit on your butt when you drive your car and sit on your butt when you use your cell phone, people think that cars and cell phones are roughly the same thing? Or even that cell phones are *more complicated*????

Ugh. No. No. NO. NO NO NO. NO I can't even. I don't. I just. Where do you even start? I mean, I've seen some bad articles by Howes, but this is just--this is terrible. First of all, Ford has more cash than GM, they aren't going to take a $4B hit because they SOLD something. They have a more well-rounded lineup than GM, and a far, far, far superior international operation than GM (in that they still HAVE an international operation, not just South America & China). Secondly, Uber isn't making money people. ​UBER ISN'T MAKING MONEY TESLA ISN'T MAKING MONEY You want something to be the future? You want something to BE THE FUTURE? It has to be PROFITABLE. Right now Uber is just a corrupt and immoral outfit that funnels venture capitalist money to underemployed inner city residents like some sort of car based welfare project. And Tesla? Tesla? If you can come up with a plausible explanation for how they're going to be profitable when they can't fund ongoing development of ANYTHING? Is electrification coming? I was on the road a lot over the past weekend. Know what's going to happen? Electrification is going to happen. And then the grid's going to get overloaded. And then rates are going to go up to build out the grid. And then people are going to see the savings from electrification disappear. Yes, electrification is here to stay, but it's going to be incredibly expensive. Americans drive, cumulatively, over half a light year every year. Over three trillion miles. Say you want just TEN PERCENT of the nation's fleet miles running on electricity. 318 billion miles. Let's assume that you get one mile for every 350 watt hours of energy. 318,000,000,000 * .350 = 111,300,000,000 kWh of additional electrical energy consumption = 12,705,479 kW of additional generating power running around the clock, 365 days a year. We're not talking megawatts of additional generating capacity, we're talking gigawatts. Know how much electricity the largest power plant in the US produces? 3.3 GW. You would have to build four plants as large as the Palo Verde power plant (which currently serves three million people) just to power 10% of the US fleet. And that's not counting the impact on the transmission network. But whatever. Elon tweets nice and GM's non-GAAP numbers look good, so Ford's in trouble, I guess.

But they don't. Morgan Stanley is, as per usual for analysts, conflating gross profit with net profit, wherein the *gross profit* on the F150 is undoubtedly greater than the net profit of Ford Motor's global organization, but that's because you're taking revenue minus cost of goods sold: You're not including the amortization of tooling and physical plant, the cost of incentives, the F-Series' share of general administrative costs (such as pensions and retiree health care), and other assorted costs.

Monetize frequently means "turn into money", as in "turn the F-Series into money" as in "spin off the F-Series"

Which, of course, is a horrible shock to those who believe that the tech industry is somehow different from all others. Every bit of that Morgan Stanley analysis is a reminder that 1999 was a long time ago for analysts in their early 30s. Any analyst my age (or silvrsvt's age) or older who is pumping out bilge of this caliber should be forced to invest their life savings in accord with their loony predictions.

Kind of. The test protocol is different; it's a 20 minute test that is run once when hot and once when cold, but at the same time, the parameters of the test are such that a defeat device could be programmed to identify operating conditions that are outside of the test parameters. Frankly, GM did do something a bit unconventional with how they setup the Duramax diesels, and--as with Navistar and VW, they may have discovered that compliance was impossible after they committed to that design. I'm not saying these lawyers are doing anything other than looking after their own wallets, but that doesn't necessarily mean they didn't stumble across a legitimate bit of subterfuge.

I'll be curious to see what comes out of this. If there is indeed software that alters the emissions profile when conditions fall outside of test parameters, they're up as stinky a creek as VW. The allegations are curious. At the same time (IANAL disclaimer), I am having a terrible time figuring out what the tort is here. Apparently, it's that GM lied to them, but they haven't suffered materially from the lie. And, to the contrary, they stand to take a serious hit if GM is forced to remediate these engines and sap their power/resale/fuel efficiency.

Nope. You know how the US basically lets the banking industry do whatever they want? Well, that's how Germany is with industry. Remember how nobody went to jail over the global financial crisis? Well, the equivalent to that was Germany deciding that VW had 'suffered enough' when they decided not to fine them for flouting assorted emissions regs for years.

No point in saying political things. Neither side is going to change the mind of the other. Also: The argument that Germany's trade policies are bad for American business is a bipartisan one.

Where do business analysts fit in this? You know, the people who look at Tesla's books and see nothing sustainable.