jobu37

Smaller. It is an A segment car. It is on the same platform as the Ford Ka.

Do you keep up with the industry news at all? Ford currently has the freshest lineup in the industry. Their planned refresh schedule moving forward is now amongst the shortest in the industry after Honda's recent announcement that they are going to increase the amount of time between updates. Additionally, Edmunds calculation of September incentive spending puts Ford under $3,000 per unit which is the lowest they have been in well over a year, maybe two years. They essentially make an additional $800.00 per unit more than either Chrysler or GM when compared to MSRP. Ford's incentives continue to drop from month to month and it appears that Nissan is on pace to pass them in incentive spending in the next couple of months. You might want to compare the incentive spending on the Focus to vehicles in it's segment to understand why Ford is being forced to put incentives on it. Additionally, I suggest you go test drive a Corolla, Civic and Focus back to back and then tell me how it is woefully out of date compared to the primary competition. Neither of those two vehicles offer anything that surpasses the Focus except the price that some loyalists are willing to pay due to their inability to test drive a Focus. As for the Escape, it is not anywhere near being the most ancient model in the segment it competes in. That dubious title belongs to the Honda CRV in the small CUV segment. The CRV has the worst fuel mileage in the segment, the worst interior noise levels in the segment , and arguably the worst styling in the segment. Yet it reigns supreme in the segment. Explain that one to me. September was a supply issue for the Escape. After selling nearly 50K in two months and the inability for Ford to get extra work days out of the KC plant at the end of August there just wasn't any product on the lots and at least here locally their still isn't any meaningful Escape inventory.

This is great news for the overall NA market. More excess capacity removed from the market. Albeit a small amount. However, if Mitsubishi and Suzuki both acknowledges and reacts to the lack of demand for their product lines maybe we will start to get a bit closer to equilibrium in the NA market. Of course Chrysler could the save the industry a lot of heartache if they would just kill off the 85% of their lineup that has no demand without excessive incentives. And also drives down transaction prices for the other domestics.

The city of Fremont and the state of California don't have enough money to pay their utility bills at this point so dishing out more to a plant that no one wants to be in is probably out of the question. Toyota and whoever the other half might be would probably ask for a kings ransom to stay to make sure that they could leave that money-losing plant for good.

This must be their first entrant in the commercial market, or at least a concept of that entrant that they announced about 8 months ago. They are jumping head first into the commercial market to try and fill up some of the unused capacity at the plant that currently builds the Titan. They currently have about 12.5 months worth of unused capacity that they need to fill. With all the various entry points into the back a mild side impact would probably total this vehicle. You would never get all those doors to realign. I'm sure only a portion of what they have on display will make it to final production.

I think Whitacre may be out of touch with what got GM into the mess they are in today. Going around buying marketshare is not going improve GM's results. It hasn't worked for them in the past, obviously and it certainly hasn't worked for the king of that approach, Chrysler. Looks like the government tried to get a "non-car guy" in Whitacre to run GM's board. Little did they know that their choice turned out to be a non car guy that thinks like a "car guy" of the past. The current approach being used by Kia and Hyundai reeks of the old GM way as well. Maybe it will come back to bite them in the arse too.

The amount of money that Ford has theoretically "already" spent to retool Michigan Truck for Focus production can potentially be pulled out of the goverment loan to do with what they want. Like pay down current debt at 35 cents on the dollar.

Quarter 2 proved that Ford had their expenses in line and Q3 will show what happens when you combine expense containment with top line growth. Ford may not make money in Q3 but they will certainly improve on the $400+ million loss from operations in the 2nd quarter. Of course, Kiley uses the NA loss (-600 mil) when talking about Ford. Vehicle production is what drives revenue and in NA, at least, they are going to be up 15% or 25% depending on whether you compare to prior quarter or prior year quarter. The only potential weakness will be South America. It is cooling off, finally. Ford may not break even in SA in Q3 or the rest of the year. However, Asia should be much stronger financially since the Fiesta supply channel will have been filled for the entire quarter. Another potential downside is the fact that there is not alot of available product on the lots. The Cash for Clunkers program has nearly completely depleted the Escape and Focus inventories at all the dealers that I have access to. The F-150 was down to only 6 units at the largest dealer here as opposed to a normal inventory of 25+. Fusion is down to nothing as it has been for months. So Ford is churning revenue currently producing vehicles to build these inventories back up but sales in August may be negatively impacted due to the shortages if not already impacted in July. I realize hindsight is 20/20 but if Ford had been able to somehow bring out the Fiesta or the new Focus prior to the Cash for Clunkers program the impact on marketshare would have been epic. Just dreaming a bit on that one.

April, May and June of 2008 were the high water marks for the Focus. Sales started falling off in July and continued to do so as gas prices fell to the point we are at now. This drop in C segment vehicles is across the industry. Civic and Corolla sales have fallen as much if not more than the Focus. In July 2008 the sales numbers were 15K. So the dropoff should be less noticeable. The Cash for Clunkers program should rev up Focus sales a bit for the next few months as well.

I have a feeling that Avalon customers won't buy something as plebeian as a Camry. Don't underestimate the blind loyalty of the Avalon owners. They have stuck with that car through the numerous transmission issues and I don't see why they would stop doing so just because Toyota starts calling the Avalon what it is has been all along. A stretched Camry with a hideous out of proportioned trunk.

Your observations make me want to share a recent after hours visit to the local Ford dealer here in NW Georgia. Let me just say that if you are a lonely person and you want to interact with the general public all you need to do is go visit the local Ford lot after they are closed. I went down to specifically see how much inventory they had on hand and take a look at the new Fusions. It was like a company picnic since there were so many people there looking at the product. There had to be close 20 people walking around. Keep in mind this is not some mega-dealer in an overly large town. I recently moved here from Texas and I used to go visit the Ford dealer back there after hours to get a bit of alone time but I now know I am going have to go somewhere else to go if I want to be alone. The lot only had 1 Fusion in stock compared to a normal stock of about 10. It looked about 50% full compared to normal. I doubt Ford will be able to post good numbers on the Fusion front since it doesn't appear that they have enough product to keep up with demand. Much better than having more product than you need, I guess. Things are definitely looking up for Ford.

The May sales rate of the Fusion/Milan/MKZ puts them at 308K on an annual basis. Which is real close to capacity when you consider that about 12K are exported to South America each year. I imagine there is still considerable 2009 units in this months numbers but in spite of that it is apparent that later in the year when the market heats up the triplets will experience demand that outstrips supply. Has anyone heard anything about a line producing Fusions at Louisville or Flat Rock?

They state that the the Camry Hybrid gets close to 40 mpg. So by that logic I guess the Fusion Hybrid gets close to 45 mpg.

Isn't the Sebring starting to gain momentum? :hyper:

1st question Because that competitive price that you are referencing is usually alot closer to the actual selling price for Honda while Ford's transaction price on the Focus is at least $2,000.00 below where the Honda transaction takes place. So Ford has had to sell their cars that cost them more to build for less money. Fortunately, with the latest iteration of the Focus this gap has closed a bit and will close more with the next Focus since the labor agreement in place for that will put Ford on more level footing on the cost side and one would expect that Ford will be able to exert more pricing power on the retail side with the more desirable attributes of the future Focus. 2nd question How many of those transplants are moving into Michigan? Ford moved production out of the U.S. under the old labor agreement. On future product plans it is very likely that the U.S. plants will be more competitive with Mexico and you can very well anticipate to see U.S. plants win more future production. Louisville for instance is just waiting to find what C platform vehicle it will be getting in the future. Perhaps you would have preferred it if Ford would have built the Fusion in the U.S four years ago which would have allowed them to make maybe a third (if that much) as much profit on each unit sold under the ridiculous labor agreements that were still in place at that time. Maybe if you had had your desire we could see Ford in the same predicament that GM and Chrysler are currently in. I'm one that is all about buying American made products and make quite the effort to do so every chance I get. But if labor is going to price themselves out of the running for new product I can certainly understand why a corporation such as Ford has no choice but to move to a more economically feasible production site. At least it wasn't across the globe. A healthy Mexico leads to more U.S. exports while a healthy Asia provides less benefit to U.S. exports since we only have one-way free trade with most Asian countries. And that one-way is not in our favor. If the current Fusion continues to demonstrate strength it is possible that Louisville may get a shift of Fusion production to go along with whatever C-car version they land. Or if the Mustang doesn't use up all the non-Mazda6 capacity at Flat Rock it may be possible that they get a shift of Fusion production. The difference now as opposed to four years ago is that both these plants are in the running whereas there was no economic reason to consider them four years ago.