mackedon

You obviously haven't seen any of these guys of the track. Don't let the suits fool you, HTT actually came through the ranks as a Vehicle Dynamics engineer and can drive circles around Scarpello and Coletti. Talk to any engineer at Ford or the guys at SVT and they will tell you as much.

Ford typically has a country manager position and then functional leads. Marcos Oliveira is the country manager for Brazil (President of Ford Brazil) and has responsibilities for sales, marketing, and profit/loss responsibilities for Brazil. There are country managers in Argentina, Venezuela, Chile, etc... HTT is the head of Product Development function for all of South America. They are peers and the positions are ranked at the same level. The country managers report up through the Fields chain of command and HTT will report to Kuzak. In Mulally's organization both Kuzak and Fields are peers and report directly to him.

So far Tesla has built a handful of showcars and has pre-sold 100 cars at $100K. That is a lot of money in their pockets for something that hasn't even gone to production yet. No one has been able to independently verify their performance claims. I applaud them for trying to fundamentally change the automotive paradigm but until they actually deliver one unit to a customer, I will withhold judgment. :boring:

From Automotive News today... Ford moves Mustang chief to Brazil Richard Truett | Automotive News / February 21, 2007 - 1:58 pm DETROIT -- Hau Thai-Tang's star is rising once again at Ford Motor Co. The Vietnamese-born engineer who has led Ford's Special Vehicle Team since 2005 is leaving for Brazil next week to become director of product development in South America. This assignment continues Thai-Tang's quick rise through Ford's executive ranks that started when he became vehicle dynamics supervisor and vehicle engineering manager for the Lincoln LS in 2000. More recently, Thai-Tang, 40, led the engineering team that created the 2005 Mustang, one of Ford's best-selling cars. Thai-Tang's team successfully relaunched the Shelby brand of Mustangs and has created several other performance-oriented versions. Thai-Tang will be responsible for developing vehicles for the South American market. He will be based in Camacari, Bahia, in Brazil. He is replacing David Breedlove, who is retiring after more than 30 years with Ford. Hermann Salenbauch, a former BMW veteran who joined Ford in 2000, takes over for Thai-Tang as head of the Special Vehicle Team. ------------------------------------------------------- I always find it funny that every time they write an article about HTT it starts with "the Vietnamese-born...". They don't refer to Coletti as the "Italian-American engineer" or Mark Fields as the "Jewish President of the Americas". As much as we like to think that we are beyond our biases, racism is still alive and well. If you don't believe me, just read the posts on this forum. Richard Jensen is mostly accurate with his previous post. The fact is HTT was promoted after the Mustang program to an E-roll job to replace Chris Theodore who was a Ford VP. He inherited Theodore's responsibilities for the Advanced Product Group AND SVT. While SVT receives most of the external attention, inside of Ford everyone recognizes that the Advance part of the job was the more important role. In fact, it is most likely that HTT's contributions in the Advance function resulted in his promotion to Brazil vs. the SVT work. Unfortunately, the advanced engineering work is on future products that are still 3 to 4 years out and most people outside of Ford are not aware of those achievements. With respect to HTT and Coletti, John worked for HTT after his appointment. Therefore, technically HTT did not replace Coletti. John elected to retire b/c he could see the hand writing on the wall that Ford was going through some very difficult business challenges and that they would not provide him with the resources he once had to deliver SVT products. In addition, he had just launched the Ford GT and that was a once in a lifetime achievement and would be hard to top. There was no rift between HTT and Coletti. In fact they worked together well when HTT ran Mustang and Coletti ran SVT. Ford went through numerous changes in senior leadership in Product Development and in Marketing durinng this period. The original SVT champions Bob Rewey in marketing and Neil Ressler in PD retired. None of the countless senior leaders that followed had any energy for SVT and viewed it as a luxury in light of the other near term business needs. Not only was SVT funding cut, they also cancelled programs that were well under way. The Lightning and Adrenalin were the most visible examples. In spite of this lack of support, the SVT team kept their heads down and delivered the GT500. We can argue about the performance of the GT500mvs. the Terminator but there is no doubt within Ford that this program was a huge business success. It has delivered all of the buzz of the prior Cobra but is much more profitable and the customer satisfaction is much higher. Given today's reality, Ford should reward teams for delivering profit and improved customer satisfaction. There's no arguing that Coletti was a larger than life public figure and rightly deserves a lot of credit for building SVT. We should also acknowledge that HTT is a very good engineer and business guy. He is very well repected by Ford management, his peers, and his team. He deserves credit for fixing the Ford GT quality issues (lower control arm fiasco), launching the Shelby GT500, and keeping the SVT team in tact in spite of the lack of support from senior management. The seeds have been planted for an SVT revival. We just won't see it for a few more years.