akirby

I held my keyfob at arm's length from my trunk and it would not open. It only has a range of about 2 feet from the door/trunk.

Ding! Ding! Nope. That's not what autolock means. It only locks if you lock it by pressing the button inside, pressing the lock button on the remote or touching the top of the door handle. Have you been leaving your car unlocked all this time?

How do you know it was locked?

I tried to tell you guys......

Discussed as part of the China Mondeo reveal. 1.5L is the cutoff for a lot of international countries regarding taxes or other penalties for larger displacement so they can use the 1.5L worldwide. It also has new technology first used in the 1.0L EB for better performance and fuel economy.

Search within the owner's guide? Try ctrl-F.

Priorities and cost benefit.

Have you seen other Chinese vehicles?

I'm sure that was the plan all along since it's exactly what they've been doing in the past. Med. Soft Ceramic is late availability so it's just not quite ready yet.

motorcraftservice.com -> owner guides

Titanium adds Medium Soft Ceramic (Job 2) and Brick Red interior colors. SE gets optional Intelligent Access/push button start.

Gary and the other hypermilers think they know more about tires than the people who actually build the tires. He thinks it's perfectly ok to run them at 100 PSI.

No power at all. Hard to reach the seatbelt. Very little suspension travel/shock absorption. Stupid zig-zag gated shifter. Horn honks when you hit the lock button once. Funky inset speedo/tach. It's cute but definitely not what I'd call "fun to drive". And I don't think the Abarth option would change most of that.

I had a Fiat 500 rental car this past week. What a horrible little car.

Thanks!

If Ford had not changed their business practices, reduced the vehicle overproduction, cut costs by closing plants and discontinuing products, etc. then they would not have survived the downturn regardless of securing loans or not. This is the biggest difference between Ford and GM. GM didn't change their business model and practices and they ended up with too much capacity and too much overhead and not enough cash to survive the downturn.

How do you know the current number isn't 8? or 9? or 2? I'm sure the plan has changed several times since 2010 and Ford isn't necessarily going to share all those details with their competitors. I'm not even sure the $1B initial figure was even accurate. Ford plays this stuff very close to the vest and for good reason. We don't even know anything about the MKC yet.

MKX and MKS refreshes were definitely not "significant" and certainly not part of the overall Lincoln long term plan. I'm sure the plan has changed several times since the original announcement.

Well - they still haven't fixed the sloppy seat tracks that first appeared in the mid 90s Explorer. Have the same problem in the 2008 Edge. Seat rocks back and forth. You'd think they would have figured that out by now. My guess is the real permanent PTU fix is a totally new design.

I don't understand why people were expecting big changes for those - everyone knows they're lame ducks waiting on total replacements.

As Spock said the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. Every company makes mistakes and Ford is no different. Before Mulally they made huge mistakes in how they managed the company and company resources (allowing individual vehicles to continue losing money, allowing NA and Europe to have two versions of the same vehicle, not developing cars, etc.). They're still making mistakes (fusion/mkz launch e.g., MKT styling) but these mistakes are small and isolated and are not endangering the company's health overall. GM tried to please everybody by building as many vehicles as possible and refusing to cut back when the market declined. While this may have seemed like a good idea it actually led to the bankruptcy because they ended up with too much capacity and overhead. All they did was delay killing Saturn, Olds and Pontiac. Ford OTOH made some massive cuts up front which hurt people initially but it allowed them to survive the downturn on their own. Sometimes you have to sacrifice a few malformed limbs so that the tree can survive and grow. Killing Mercury was a great example. Ford not only survived that but is thriving even better than before on its own. Lincoln dealers may be suffering now but the end result will be much better than before if all goes according to plan. The reason we point out GM's mistakes and not others is simple - THEY WENT BANKRUPT. Other companies make mistakes but not to the level of GM's mismanagement of the entire company. The other companies were able to ride out the downturn because they had their production under control. GM still has too much overhead (Buick and GMC). They're producing too many vehicles in most segments trying to keep the sales lead at the expense of profits. They're getting better but still not making good long term strategic product decisions (too many platforms, switching platforms, making one off vehicles) and they are depriving Chevy because of Buick and GMC. Is it wrong? Not really - they're making a profit. Is it the best use of their investors money? Probably not. Is it the best long term strategy? Probably not. Can they survive doing it? Sure, as long as we don't have another economic downturn. I would like to see GM cut GMC and make Denali a Chevy trim level. Keep the Buick vehicles, rebrand them as Chevys and get rid of the Chevy counterparts. Or make them Caddys. Keep the Buick brand name for China. Stop worrying about the sales race and who is number one and start rightsizing production to match demand. Finally - start investing more in Chevy because that's where the volume and profits lie.

Correct. At least that was the plan last I heard. MKZ and hybrids stay in Hermosillo.

FlatRock production starts in August.

What Richard said. And let me add the following. I've worked on several 7, 8 and 9 figure business cases and been involved in budget planning for a fortune 100 company. Some people don't realize that there are always more projects with positive ROI than the company has funding for. There might be enough funding for 100 projects but there are 150 or 200 on the list. There is only so much capital available so you have to prioritize the projects based on cost of investment, speed of ROI and strategic importance. There might be 4 new vehicle projects asking for funding, all with positive ROI but only enough funding for 2. It's never as simple as "can we sell it at a profit?". If Ford was irresponsible like GM then they'd just build whatever made them happy and screw the business case. Just like the Solstice/Sky and XLR. There was never a valid business case for those products. How much did GM waste on those alone? The other factor is that you can usually come up with a positive ROI for a single project. E.g. individual projects for 3 new vehicles all built on different platforms. Looked at individually you could approve each one and be assured that you're doing the right thing. But a smart company looks at those 3 projects and thinks "what if we do them all on the same platform?" and it turns out the ROI for that is 10x the ROI from doing them individually. GM is doing projects the first way. Ford seems to be doing more of the latter. If you don't understand all this then you don't understand why companies make the decisions they make.

The dealers in the U.S. simply don't have the ability to turn them on. I don't know if it's the car's firmware or the dealer software but it is what it is. It's nowhere near 11%. NHTSA researched it extensively and could find no conclusive evidence that DRLs reduced accidents significantly enough to warrant a mandate.