BORG

I will say that Flex is one of the few products designed in the US instead of Europe, and I MUCH prefer interior designs out of Dearborn, but they tend to be trendier and date faster.

Flex has allot of fans, part of it might be the culture of exclusivity since it's such a low selling product. The Flex is just beyond dated at this point as a new car, but it's still something special and stylish.

Flex is so far away from the grave that it still gives them time to greenlight a successor, but if the market is softening I really doubt they want to diversify.

The XTS is the only one I know that does this, which I guess is the competition. Although it's getting a new design in a few months with makes them all LED. As for awards, it's been a long time since Ford had critically praised products, even the F-150 left critics unimpressed and never earned a significant press award (worse yet they were upstaged by Chevy Colorado). Ford is more Toyota than Honda.

I don't think the standard headlamps are suitable for the Continental, especially since it has such a sedate design, the details are what make the car. The standard lights don't even have LED turn indicators which shocked the hell out of me when I first saw the car on the road, it is the most expensive Lincoln after all. I know it's inconsequential and probably saves Lincoln money, but it makes the most common version of the Continental look like it's 5 years old already.

You're making my point, when you have a dud like MKS and a long history of underselling the market, anything new is going to be better. Ford sedans haven't had this same level of neglect or absence. The MKZ did get a facelift which should prop up sales, although this year it looks like it'll just zero them out. Continental is selling very well at the moment on the heels of pent-up demand but I suspect it'll be down to 800-1200 a month longterm with MKZ likely flattening or going down as it has been. We saw the same thing happen to Navigator. Lincoln doesn't have allot of new customers coming in so they are still just shuffling them around. They are inching up each year, adding a few thousand here and there and hopefully adding bigger spenders.

Transit, Transit Connect, and Police Intercepters have significant retail customers? And what percentage of F-Series/SuperDuty is sold into fleets? Might I suggest it's more than a Ford Fusion?

Transit, Transit Connect, Police, F-Series, Super Duty et.al

Colorado/Canyon alone outsell all of Lincoln on constrained capacity which they are expanding. So in reality they are doing far better than GM had planned. The Transit was a good product to focus on with new regulations threatening to end Ford's van business, but it's also picking up on a segment Ford was already in and very successful at, not to mention they already had a van facility so bringing it online wasn't a massive logistical problem. So Ford really is just holding onto something they already had instead of something they lost like Ranger. GM on the other hand had a weak van business so focusing on Midsize trucks turns out to grow their business just as well. But I do think Ford is in a better longterm position since they will have both Midsize and Van businesses before GM does. Ford has allot of very large gaps in its product range that is causing problems for them now since they aren't in growth segments and have been extremely slow to respond. I think the next goal for Ford is just to sort out it's core range of products and be able to respond more quickly. I know Ford isn't as incentivized to react because they have F-Series to absorb gaps while they slowly move the giant ship and pivot the business. The end of this decade can't come soon enough and hopefully they've made the right decisions (they've taken enough time to make them).

Ford has very popular fleet only products, of course they are the fleet leader in the industry. If they weren't, then something is wrong. The problem with Ford is that they are loosing far too much in retail and shifting their reliability on F-Series to the highest point in its history.

I'm pretty sure Toyota would love to have Ford's F-Series business instead of Tundra and Tacoma. Ford has allot of manufacturing flexibility problems to deal with which I'm sure has hampered their decisions on some of these products, which probably get pushed further back when F-Series is their crown jewel and a Ranger represents a threat to that. Essentially Ranger probably wasn't coming back unless GM could show it worked, which they did in pretty spectacular fashion. Now that they've sorted out their longterm manufacturing plans, they have space to produce it and so it will come. Ford is often tardy but so is Apple

I actually think the updated Focus looks great if you get the right appearance package, otherwise the Focus can look cheap. It's one of those cars that makes you pay to look decent. This use to be one of the things I liked about Ford, they didn't pinch every area of the car. The Focus is just a really hard car to buy next to the competition, they are simply asking far too much for what it is and everything looks more upscale than a similarly equipped Focus or offers more standard equipment (especially Hyundai and Chevy).

Ford has 4 sedans and 5 SUVs, Lincoln has 2 sedans and 4 SUVs. When you have 2 sedans (with one selling only a few hundred), how much can you be affected?

Fair enough, the door handles in the Ford Escape are the worst I've seen since the 1991 Escort.

Pretty sure anybody who owns one won't buy another, which I'm sure is part of the problem now.

The Focus has to be a massive money loser right with such low volume, factory shutdowns, expensive recalls and warranty repairs.

The MKZ is a complete mismatch of designs but Continental does it a bit better. However, all the Continentals I've seen have been the ones that look like a 90's Buick LeSabre with ridiculously tiny rims and burgundy or gold paint, they can get REALLY ugly for the elderly folk. The Gold is obscenely gross.

That is completely irrelevant 8-12 years later and the Flex interior is full of hard plastics, sharp angles, cheap randomly placed switchgear, and plastic wood. It even uses the same cheap Fusion doorhandles and switchgear from 2005. Hell, 6 years ago the Ford Fusion won car of the year....would it be acceptable if Ford had left that alone until 2020? (actually 2022 to match the timeline here).

Taurus as is will probably be here through 2020, if a replacement is in the cards it definitely won't involve what China has. Taurus really is the new G-Body Impala, extremely ancient, not very good, and nobody should buy it, but hey we have a factory building it so why not. Ford is getting a little flabby in the middle with these aging and unpopular products with no clear future, it reminds me a little of pre-Nassar Ford.

Yeah, all dealerships were affected on the last day of the month which is causing the reporting problems. I'm still a little shocked that Ford's infrastructure is this fragile, or that they had a substation in the basement of their HQ. How common is it to have a substation in a building in the middle of a huge campus?

Ford can be unexpected, especially in a time with so many products in limbo and last minute decisions being made.

The Flex and MKT probably have to get something new, the MKT is getting a new grille insert to hold it over. I wonder if the interior switchgear is being changed at all just to get rid of the touch controls. I don't expect any design changes beyond consolidating swappable parts.

An MCE is not likely.

Ford is literally a dumpster fire, haha.

That is probably tied to the next-gen Explorer, but man that's a long run. The real problem is the interior of the Flex which is REALLY outdated and dates back to 2008, the outside can hold its own for awhile.