akirby

Maybe but it seems Ford is putting their C2 resources into Bronco Sport and Maverick new vehicles first.

It’s not bean counters. Bean counting is decontenting Edge and Nautilus. Not doing a full refresh on Fusion. Not replacing the Focus tranny. There are lots of examples of bean counting. Cancelling focus and fusion is different. It’s a matter of being resource constrained. The savings from cancelling focus and fusion were put into new vehicles. So it’s a choice between keeping fusion and bringing Bronco sport or maverick to market. They’re betting that the new products will generate more profit long term. Fusion will be back in some form or another. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a return of focus in some form too after the factories are converted to C2 and the new products are out the door. So you can argue that the new products won’t be as successful and it was a bad business decision (only time will tell) but it’s not bean counting. The amount of capital and R&D available is fixed and you simply can’t do everything at the same time.

Seems crazy now that we used to have to wait for the monthly magazines to see new models or get automotive news.

Why is it that we have to choose sides on every issue and the only 2 choices are the extreme left or extreme right? I think it's a combination of fake news and confirmation bias perpetuated by social media. If you think the states should reopen with precautions you don't care if people die. If you think we should take a vaccine you're just trying to track me. It's ridiculous and needs to stop. Somewhere in the middle is all the common sense we seem to have lost along the way.

A $22K Fusion wouldn't even generate enough profit to pay for the electric bill at the factory. All this talk about needing cheaper vehicles now. If you just lost your job or are in fear of losing your job you're not going to buy any new vehicle at all. You'll keep what you have and if you have to buy something it will be a very cheap used vehicle.

If I develop 6 new platforms and 6 new powertrains and you only develop 3 of each in the same time frame I'm spending twice as much as you are no matter how they're shared. That's all I'm saying. That's not arm-chair speculation. It's also not worth arguing about.

Not hard to back up if you consider that Ford has had 3 different platforms for Fusion within the span of 10 years (2012, CD3. 2013-2020 - CD4. 2022 - C2). And in the same time frame they introduced 4 brand new ecoboost engines - 1.5L 3 cylinder, 1.5L 4 cylinder, 1.6L, 2.0L. Meanwhile Toyota just takes the old Camry platform, tweaks it a little and puts a new tophat on every 6 years. I do think they introduced one new 2.0L turbo engine but the rest is largely unchanged. It's a successful model from a financial perspective.

It is for the US. Not sure about the Edge but other Ford vehicles have had ST-Line versions in Europe for many many years. This is the second time they've done it here (2019 Fiesta had it).

I used to get the magazine and it was really good. Then they went to bi-weekly publication but for some reason did not change their name to AutoEveryOtherWeek. Do they still publish the paper version?

We're almost to Transformers yellow Camaro level.......

They really should be reporting at least a week in arrears just because of the inherent delays in testing confirmation and data gathering. But folks don't want to wait. The errors that occurred are IMO just that - errors caused by trying to report data too quickly and not some conspiracy scheme. The data has patterns based on day of the week - they should really be reporting on weekly totals and averages not daily. Just give us the raw data with dates and let us do our own charts if they're not going to do all the charts county by county. Just one hotspot in one county can make the state number look bad even though the other 158 are doing great.

My point exactly. Not to mention the idiots who look at a chart on total cases to date and proclaim that it’s not going down!!

You missed the point. There is no blind spot if you adjust your mirrors properly. Doesn’t matter what you’re driving or for what purpose. People just don’t like it or they incorrectly believe it’s a safety issue.

Here is my point - if a hospital normally sees 15 deaths per month from viruses/infections and its seeing 15 deaths per month now and they’re all covid 19 positive, then it’s no different than the flu or other illnesses. Doesn’t mean we can stop all the precautions - e.g. we need to continue limiting large gatherings and still take precautions, But I don’t think it means we should be keeping businesses closed.

You can’t go by new cases because everybody hasn’t been tested. Cases will go up as testing increases even though they may not be hospitalized. That’s why hospitalizations and deaths are better indicators even though they lag a few days. Provided they are accurately reported and not inflated.