akirby
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Posts posted by akirby
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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.
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1 hour ago, fordmantpw said:
My daughter flashed her lights at someone a couple weeks ago because she said it looked like their lights were on bright and she couldn't see. Turns out it was a cop. Cost her $150. Apparently, the cop was an ass about it too. Expensive lesson for a college kid.
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. -
18 minutes ago, fordmantpw said:
What does the dealer do to "earn" that $15k and why do they deserve more?
Paperwork. 😂. That’s a hell of a doc fee.-
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6 hours ago, tbone said:
i understand where you are coming from, that this vehicle will have top of the line performance, and I don’t doubt that, but it just doesn’t appeal to me otherwise. As you have pointed out, the garish wing doesn’t help matters, but it has its purpose. I might like the car more if it didn’t have that.
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.-
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5 hours ago, jpd80 said:
And that’s exactly my point, Ford took off with large design teams developing their key vehicles but, the efficiencies from the skunkworks aren’t just this type of battery or that control system…Ford compared what was done between the developments and discovered that much of the efficiency gains comes from not doing the conventional development way that Ford did…they need someone to think outside of the box and show them where all the unnecessary, redundant steps are in the process and look at new way to do everything…..especially cutting the time to make vehicles. An ex Tesla engineering manager is the perfect person to show them how it’s done.
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.
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That capacity can easily be reused.
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4 hours ago, jpd80 said:
On the contrary,
The vehicles for Oakville were transferred from Cuautitlan after being delayed two years and redesigned,
so by the time they arrive they will be delayed four years and hopefully, not only up to date but cutting edge.
Double the production cost,
Mach E was a massive redesign, so basically double the funding was thrown at it to correctnot only the styling error but also the inadequate battery and driveline which were simply
extensions of what was used in the previous E Focus. None of that was going to work.
Priority,
The need for a quickly developed Lightning meant that it went first while Ford delayed
it’s answer to the Silverado BEV. The current Lightning allowed Ford to get a BEV truckup and running faster, the lessons learned for the current Lightning are still continuing
which is why Ford is already revising T3 batteries, there much to be grateful about this
pull back as Ford was always going to struggle with battery range looking inadequate.
The biggest gift will be if the Cybertruck turns out to be a disappointment to the many
eager buyers …..hopefully Tesla plays its part and snatches defeat from the jaws of victory
Whats not mentioned anywhere is that Ford has had a good look under the hood of VW
and that MEB tool kit, deciding it didn’t need the over priced batteries, the VW controller
or the drives and motors……LOL, with the Ford top hats, there’s not much VW left in them…
Maybe I should have said this first….I probably sound critical of Ford and I apologise for the high horse attitude. I just want Ford
to be the best it can be and not settle for just good enough, get out in front and lead….
I don’t disagree with any of that. Were just looking at it from different angles. -
46 minutes ago, GearheadGrrrl said:
Blue Oval City doesn't have a 3000 employee payroll to make.
And again how does idling BOC help OAC? -
3 hours ago, DeluxeStang said:
I personally love the way it looks, it's sexy as hell. The wing is a little too big, but it serves a purpose. Is 300k a lot of money? Of course, but relative to the level of performance this car offers, it's a bargain. Keep in mind this thing is literally going to be beating million dollar exotics for a third the price, that's not just speculation either. Ford says it can run the run in well under 7 mins, that puts it above the 918 and p1. I'm willing to bet this car will beat the Ford gt around most tracks as well, given it's massive areo and power advantage.
I think folks are severely underestimating the performance of this thing.-
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3 hours ago, GearheadGrrrl said:
The new assembly plants under construction can be delayed- There will be contractual penalties but nothing near the cost of paying OAC's workers with no cars built and no revenue produced.
Idling blue oval city would do nothing to help OAC. -
3 hours ago, Oac98 said:
What about Oakville was rushed?? The decision to get rid of the Edge too early? Or the product that they still can’t get right it seems??
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.
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1 hour ago, silvrsvt said:
It doesn't matter if its being driven 250 or 50 miles because it is still showing a large difference between what it should be getting going by testing. If someone isn't plugging in their car or as much as they should, the total use of fuel will be higher.
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.
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1 hour ago, silvrsvt said:
We already argued that point...that information is being collected by the OBFCM
https://green-driving.jrc.ec.europa.eu/JRCmatics_Monitoring_Fuel_Consumption_from_OBD
Which collects the following:
It doesn't matter if it’s being driven 250 or 50 miles because it is still showing a large difference between what it should be getting going by testing. If someone isn't plugging in their car or as much as they should, the total use of fuel will be higher.
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.
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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.
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24 minutes ago, rmc523 said:
I understand too - but it has seemed like those sorts of upgrades can be swapped out "on the fly" after production has started, rather than continually pushing back new product.
As I pointed out above, it'd be a bit different story if ICE products weren't gutted for EVs, so now it's the worst of both worlds - EV product delays and limited new/updated ICE products until they can push both out.
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.
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30 minutes ago, rmc523 said:
I think his point is that there are always going to be improvements that they find....and if you keep waiting for things to be "perfect", you'll never get there, and have endless delays because they're always finding something better.
I think they should've kept the Rivian Lincoln product to gauge reaction and to give them an EV product until their in-house stuff was ready.
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. -
32 minutes ago, rmc523 said:
I see that all the time - the problem is, most if not all cars now have the gauges on day and night, and have running lights (some of which use the headlights as the running lights), so they drive along with the gauges on, and see light coming from the front of their car and figure their lights are on. Sometimes I flash my high beams at them, sometimes I leave it be.....half the time they don't know what I'm flashing them for anyway.
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.
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15 minutes ago, Rick73 said:
A great way to discourage that kind of behavior is to enforce laws. It was reported last night that Dallas PD issued arrest warrants for Rashee Rice and Knox associated with their street racing and subsequent crashes. Assuming they are found guilty, much will depend on punishment. Too little and it will just encourage more of the same.
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. -
7 hours ago, jpd80 said:
I’m sorry but how many times has Ford tried this same idea, they now have an new plan
that lets them compete with brand x…only to find that the competition have also moved on….
God for them trying new things but it also shows just how much Ford rushed its roll out of BEVs,
everything now is curling up the moment the economy backs off, amazing how many $$$ they burn….
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.-
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7 hours ago, jpd80 said:
I sense that Ford is still in denial with the continuing ned for gasoline vehicles…
I have a feeling that newly discovered efficiencies in manufacturing and equipment may be behinda lot of the product delays, maybe Ford is learning so much that emerging product needs to already
be redesigned lest it be DOA to customers.
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.
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7 hours ago, jpd80 said:
The way Ford is back pedalling with Lightning production at its present facility,
going forward with a new, big ass BEV plant mightn’t be the smartest idea.
but if that’s the hill Ford wants to die on, then so be it…
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. -
15 minutes ago, silvrsvt said:
What are you talking about?
https://climate.ec.europa.eu/document/download/b644dafe-1385-4b56-98d9-21e7e9f3601b_en?filename=report.pdfIt just seems like that peoples biases are coming through without actually reading what the report says and the information in it.
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.
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30 minutes ago, Joe771476 said:
Just hand over the crossover market. Just like Ford handed over Class 8 heavy truck, farm tractor, and the mid and full-size sedan biz. What's left? Ford light and medium duty truck, Explorer and Mustang! That's it!
You forgot Transit, Maverick, Bronco, Bronco Sport, Mach-E, Escape, Expedition, Navigator, Nautilus, Corsair and Aviator. But who’s counting.-
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1 hour ago, Deanh said:
talk about a car with presence...15k?....wild guess...there WILL be addendums if 15k is what Ford thinks is adequatre compoensation for basically a 300k investment...I would presume the Dealer has to floor the vehicle as well, that would eat up at 15k in no time...Ford pulled the same shennagins with the GT, althoiugh if I remember correctly on the $250k the delivery fee was 3k per unit, but the Dealer had to pay for a GT exclusive service bay, I think dust free was a requirement...( seem to recall that cost was 75 -80k )
No investment - they’re all presold by invitation only. And of course there will be markups just done a little different.
Toyota Q1 2024 Sales Results
in Competing Products
Posted
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.