akirby

The fact they already have a vehicle and space at Flat Rock says the ROI must be terrible. GM and Toyota have always valued volume over margins while Ford is the opposite here lately. GM and Toyota definitely have lower costs so their ROI is batter on individual vehicles. Ford wasted a lot of money developing so many new platforms and engines recently - some of which were discarded. And we know about warranty costs. When you keep things longer and don’t develop as many new things your cost tends to stay much lower.

Not a driving story but in college I was asst mgr at a local furniture store. The manager only had one set of keys and I had to close at night, so I would lock the front door with the key and throw them in the back of the delivery truck so the mgr could open the next morning. One night I closed up at 8:00 pm, put up the keys and jumped in my 1975 cutlass. But I couldn’t remember if I locked the back door so I drove around, jumped on the dock, checked the back door and jumped back in the car because it was cold. Local cop sees me and thinks I’m breaking in. I said I’m the asst mgr, the store just closed 5 mins ago and the keys are in the back of that truck. He finally let me go and said stop acting so suspicious.

You have to be careful about that. It can appear that other cars have brights on when it’s just the curve of the road. If the fog lamps are on then brights can’t be on for factory lights at least. That cop must have been having a bad day.

Paperwork. 😂. That’s a hell of a doc fee.

But that’s just it - if you’re not interested in lap times on a track then this isn’t the car for you anyway. It’s not a daily driver. Think of it more like the cobra jet mustang drag cars. Or a 911 GT3 RS. You have to make huge compromises to maximize track performance. Everything on it is about maximizing performance not appearance.

Again we agree just using different words. I think they did some process reengineering 2 yrs ago based on what they knew at the time and what they learned from Mach-e and Lightning but Farley thought there was more to be done including low cost EVs. So he formed the skunkworks team. But you can’t just sit back and wait 2 years to see IF they find something new that would apply to other programs. There is risk in waiting for new processes and there is risk to moving ahead in parallel. If it only cost them 1 year on T3 then moving ahead was better than waiting 2 years to start. We all know Oakville was the wrong products in the wrong plant at the wrong time. Period.

That capacity can easily be reused.

I don’t disagree with any of that. Were just looking at it from different angles.

And again how does idling BOC help OAC?

I think folks are severely underestimating the performance of this thing.

Idling blue oval city would do nothing to help OAC.

They rushed to kill Edge and Nautilus too early just to meet an anticipated demand that now isn’t happening and apparently with the wrong kind of product. They could have brought a C2 edge and nautilus to Oakville and decided later if it made sense to convert to EVs. I think it started with the 5 EVs from VW’s platform and pending government mandates to go EV quickly around the world. But then the VW platforms didn’t work out. And then the market cooled off and govts backed off the EV mandates, but by the time that happened it was too late to save Nautilus and Edge and there was no suitable Edge to import either. And now the direction is cheaper EVs and a whole factory sits idle. All because they rushed to get EVs out.

But it does matter if you drive a lot of miles per day. The WLTP assumed that you plug in every night and you never drive more than 40 miles without recharging, thus you’re operating in EV mode 75% of the time. That’s the utility factor used in the WLTP estimates. Assuming a 30 mile EV range. If you get 40 mpg without the battery then you drove 40 miles and only used .25 gallons for the last 10 miles. Thats 160 mpg. That is the estimate to which the real world data was compared. Now let’s say you plug in every night but you drive 110 miles per day. The first 30 are on battery so 80 miles on gas which consumes 2 gallons. Thats only 55 mpg or 1/3 of what the WLTP predicted. Is it because I didn’t plug in or because I drove a lot more miles that they expected every day. Surely you can understand this.

Whether it’s collected or not, that was not used in the report. The only thing they used is the avg fuel economy (liters per 100 Km) and they calculated CO2 based on that. I’m not arguing any more until you can acknowledge that point. All they measured was overall fuel economy.

Around here the jacked up pickup and jeep guys like to run their huge LED offroad light bars on the highway. Talk about blinding. I can only hope the cops are stopping them.

Don’t disagree but most of what the skunkworks was working on was new vehicles. And some things are just too fundamental to be easily changed later. It could also just be the need to focus more resources on development of the new cheaper EVs that have a much better ROI than what was in Oakville. And maybe Oakville isn’t cancelled but really is just on hold due to resources. Hard to say. Thats always been a problem with Ford. Not enough resources to do everything and no appetite for building new plants or hiring more people. They just seem to make do with what they have to keep costs down and end up making a lot of product compromises.

I agree with that. But I think we’re underestimating the impact of the changes from the skunkworks team. I think they are fundamentally changing the way Ford designs and builds EVs which will either give them a big cost advantage or at worst keep them on par with other industry leaders. You don’t need 100 people working for 2 years in secret just to redesign a couple of vehicles. It’s far more fundamental in my opinion especially considering the team members.

I’ve found flashing your lights only work about 20% of the time, maybe less. These people are just clueless. The solution is simple - mandate auto headlamps that default to on when you start the vehicle like my Nautilus. And they turn on with wipers. DRLs make it worse and don’t really help much. Just look at all the YouTube videos where people pull out in front of others in broad daylight without even looking.

While I agree we need enforcement it won’t stop habitual violators. We regularly enforce laws against murder including life in prison and even death but that doesn’t stop bad people from murdering others.

They didn’t rush T3. They didn’t rush Mach-E or Lightning - they are good first effort vehicles and learning experiences and they’re doing ok with proper pricing. The only thing rushed was Oakville.

They're not in denial they just announced hybrids for every gasoline vehicle. They just overreacted to the EV sales boom and pending government regulations and tried to do too much too fast. T3 was the right move and timing. I think Mach-E and Lightning were the right moves at the time and they learned a lot. But the mess with Oakville and VW and Rivian was a cluster F of epic proportion. And I don’t understand why you keep harping on design. They didn’t create a skunkworks team and delay projects to just work on design. It’s all about lowering the cost of EVs from battery type, source, design and size/range to vehicle design to electronics to manufacturing processes and suppliers. They obviously identified improvements for T3 in addition to new vehicles and that made the ones planned for Oakville obsolete.

The only problem with Lightning is price. T3 is the one BEV that Ford should be all in on right now given their leadership in the truck market. And building a new plant is the right way to do i pt instead of cancelling more existing products and getting caught with your pants down.

Oh for Pete’s sake. You’re the one with a reading comprehension problem. All they measured was fuel consumption and they compared it to the expected WLTP estimates. Period. End of story. They even admit that the WLTP utility factor which assumes how much of the drive is in electric mode was wildly optimistic. They expected a PHEV would drive around 75% of miles driven on battery power. For a PHEV with 30 mile range that means charging nightly and never driving more than 40 miles without recharging. You simply cannot determine whether a vehicle is being plugged in nightly by only looking at fuel consumption because two PHEVs could both charge every night and one could get 42 mpg and the other could get 120 mpg and another could use no fuel at all depending on number of miles driven per day. Look at it another way. You’re fully charged. If you drive 30 miles your utility factor is 100% EV. If you drive 60 miles you’re 50%. 120 miles - 25%. 240 miles - 12.5%. You can’t make conclusions about plugging in or not plugging in based on fuel economy alone. You must know how many miles are driven each day and they aren’t measuring that.

You forgot Transit, Maverick, Bronco, Bronco Sport, Mach-E, Escape, Expedition, Navigator, Nautilus, Corsair and Aviator. But who’s counting.

No investment - they’re all presold by invitation only. And of course there will be markups just done a little different.