Sevensecondsuv

So GM jumped the shark and is bringing us a 400/400 motor that will be out-torqued by.... let's see here: The Ford gen 1 6.2L The Ford gen 2 6.2L The Ford 3v 6.8L The Ford 2v 6.8L (since 1999!!!!) The Ford 7.5L bbf (since 1993!!!!) The Ram 6.4L hemi The Dodge/Jeep 6.1L hemi The GM 7.4L vortec (since 1996!!!!) The GM 8.1L Talk about bringing a knife to a gun fight! This is a rumor that makes no sense at all. Why would GM go through the trouble of raising deck height only to add marginal output to the current, yet ancient, 6.0L (360 hp / 380 ft-lbs)? Also, anyone who believes the 7.x is going to be any less than 450/500 isn't thinking straight. As was already pointed out, the 6.2 already does 385/430. What is all that extra displacement going to do? Heck - the rev-happy tiny little 5L in the mustang makes 420 ft-lbs for pete's sake. The existing V10 could have been updated to make 450/500 without changing much besides the head. It would make zero sense to spend millions on a new engine and production line if it's not going to significantly exceed the capability of every other gas truck engine currently on the market.

Meh. Close enough my point still stands. The big question is how much extra turbo and injector does the ranger come with? If there's some margin left in those pieces (like, for instance, if they're the same pieces used on the 350 hp version in the RS), a simple tune could unleash 50-100 extra horsepower. Ah! The beauty of forced induction!

Sure about that? The 2.3 in ranger configuration makes 275 hp. The 3v 4.6 in the old Sport Trac made 305 or 310 if memory serves....

I've got a 445 (little brother to the triple nickle) I picked up a few years back for general lifting/digging duties around my place. Thing's a beast. With filled tires and a 1000 lb counterweight on the three point, it'll lift my '95 F250 completely off the ground. (If you're wondering how exactly that was rigged - I've got a set of forks on a quick-tatch setup on the loader). She popped the front input shaft seal on the transmission this past summer. Looks like I get to split it to replace a $10 seal. Not looking forward to that one!

So how many $800 Ford trucks do I have to buy off craigslist before I qualify for a free, brand new F150?

Finally some good news

Because if that was the only thing that mattered, Ford should just quit the auto biz and invest all it's money in something else. There are plenty of things to invest in that consistently produce way better returns than anything the auto biz has ever come up with. Just think, they wouldn't even need all the employees! Of course that's nonsense, but this is the business Ford operates in. <10% margins are just the way it is. The winners (those companies making 9% instead of 2%) get there mostly by volume manufacturing / efficiencies of scale, and keeping costs as low as possible. Simply abandoning the lower half of the new car market isn't a recipe for winning the new car manufacturing game. You need the volume of the cheap cars to keep the high-margin vehicle's costs low, which keeps them high-margin. If it all averages out closer to 10% than 0%, you're winning.

Except most of those preorders/sales are to foreign markets (Europe mostly). That and a significant number have cancelled and requested a refund since Tesla can't seem to get around to building them in significant numbers let alone build ones that are priced near the mythical $35000 mark. But oh yeah, Ford needs to be chasing Tesla down the electric rabbit hole. People need to remember that the ICE vs electric debate was fought and settled early on in the development of the automobile. Battery and motor technology hasn't changed enough in the last 100 years relative to ICE technology to re-think the issue. If it wasn't for the govt-industrial greenie complex, Tesla wouldn't exist and no serious person would consider electric a viable option for automobiles. Think of this in reverse: electric cars are normal/standard and somebody introduces the ICE powertrain. It would be nearly universally adopted overnight by a free market society due to the myriad of benefits it offers. Compare that to electric: it's been around for decades (as long as the ICE, really) and has never managed anything beyond fringe market penetration.

Outside of hybrid utilities, there is very little proof that there is or will ever be a market for such things. It looks a lot more like a Wall Street pipe dream than an actual business opportunity. Now of course you have to keep Wall Street happy and you don't want to be left out of any emerging markets, but Ford is chasing this stuff directly at the expense of new traditional product that needed yesterday. It's the traditional product that will pay the bills for the foreseeable future and Ford just can't seem to stick to a plan to deliver any. Every three months they announce a new plan for product but they never seem to quite accomplish anything.

It does get old watching the same tragic story unfold on repeat about every 10 years. But at least we know Ford will bounce back. They always have in the past.

Those don't count because Charger hasn't been in production continuously. When someone says "charger/challenger" nowadays it's pretty much universally understood to mean the DCX cars that were developed during the diamler-chrysler days and live on under chrysler-fiat.

I know what you're talking about RE: the fwd/probe mustang drama from the early 90s. I just don't see what that could possibly have to do with challenger/charger. If chrysler/fiat had actually threatened to change them to fwd, then I could see an analogy. But chrysler/fiat has never even floated the idea. So I don't see any analogy to Ford's mustang/probe drama of the early 90s.

The charger currently is and always has been rwd

A guy at work bought one new last year. It's a really nice car, even with the V6. Way nicer than any of the fwd stuff in that segment. I'll never understand GM's approach to that car. It's almost like they wanted it to fail and did everything possible to ensure it did.

I agree, unless they name it Fusion. Then all it would take is a fairly modest ad campaign to educate buyers about the all-new class-exclusive attributes and dna borrowed from Mustang.

When I say "rwd powertrain" I mean a longitudinal engine with the transmission between the drivers and passenger footwells that primarily supplies power to the rear axle. I don't mean that it would exclude an AWD variant. Fundamentally different than an engine mounted sideways with trans crammed inbetween the engine and driver's side front suspension, even if it has an AWD option with a ptu capable of sending a percentage of torque to the rear axle.

There a couple ways to market this. The first is advertise it as a new extension of Mustang. That seems to be what Ford is hinting at, but I question how much they can really grow the mustang market. Are mustang sales limited by the inconvenience of 2 doors, or are they limited because there's only a certain percentage of the population that's willing to spend disposable income on a toy? The second approach is to market it as a mainstream midsize sedan, except as a slightly higher MSRP "premium" alternative to the offerings from toy/honda/gm/nissan/hyundai. This would be tricky because you'd have to convince people who are buying primarily on practicality that the mustang DNA/rwd powertrain is worth the premium price tag. This would have to include advertisements educating the public about the drawbacks of the fwd competition -torque steer, huge front overhangs, terrible weight distribution, loss of steering capability when the tires spin in snow, etc. Maybe Ford is already planning this for the new Explorer since it's going to be one of the only rwd options in it's segment. Whatever they do though, just don't market it like GM did with the SS.

So we're basically getting a rwd cd6 fusion to replace the fwd fusion only it'll be called mustang (or something else as pointed out above). Makes sense to me. Midsize 4-door sedan is too big/important of a segment for mass market automakers like Ford to simply abandon. Although common in the segment, the only reason for fwd configuration is ease of assembly at the factory. Apparently Ford thinks they offset the additional assembly cost (although maybe they engineered that out with CD6) by marketing it as a premium option. Plus, sharing chassis/powertrain with the real/2-door mustang will make a proper Sport/ST/GT version possible vs that torque-managed excuse for a performance version they've currently got going in the Fusion Sport. Although Ford could have saved a lot of hand-wringing by simply saying that fusion will be replaced by a fundamentally different 4 door sedan rather than saying they're going to kill it completely.

Meh. Rangers are plenty durable. Ford definitely didn't cut any corners in that department. In fact a lot of the suspension bits and pieces are shared with F150s. Those very shackles are the same part as 2wd F150s take. For some reason they don't rot out as bad on 150s though. I think the ranger has some weird galvanic couple issue that makes those shackles an extreme anode. I've seen them half gone while the rest of the frame is still black.

Ranger bodies hold up quite well but the leaf spring shackle hangers rot out before anything else. I've fixed at least a half dozen trucks with this issue, including two of my own. For some reason nobody notices the sagging and awful ride until the leaf springs come up thru the bed floor. You know it's bad when every autozone in the rust belt keeps a couple sets of aftermarket shackles and hangers in stock.

Yep. Abandoning your core/root market is a real dumb move. Ford has always been an everyman's auto/truck company. Hackett seems to want to chase ATPs above all else. I can see why - running a profitable car company is so much easier when margins are high. But nobody is ever going to embrace Ford as a high-end make. All it'll get them is dwindling market share and priced out of many markets. Ford isn't like Hyundai where they came in as essentially Yugo with very little barrier to being a Toy/Honda competitor other than building better cars. Ford has been here for 110+ years and has a firmly established reputation. Any attempt to move significantly up market isn't going to work - PAG being exhibit-A. 2017 median household income in the US was approx $60k I think. This is the buyers Ford should be focused on. Not the $120k+ household income it takes to realistically afford a $50,000 F150 that Ford likes to brag about.

Just the same ones you'd get on an automatic - a boost in torque and a slight bump in fuel economy. This is assuming that the electric motor is attached to the front of the engine somewhere like on the new Ram trucks such that it wouldn't require any different parts on the manual trucks. If it's integrated into or attached to the 10-spd auto trans, then no, there's probably not a good reason to do the engineering to add it to the manual trans.

I didn't say there was a reason for Ford or any other automaker to put a gear box behind an electric motor. It was just an interesting story about someone who actually did it to see how it'd work. Each gear basically became a speed control function. And it would REALLY roast them in the low gears due to the torque multiplication! But I stand by the 48v mild hybrid. No reason that wouldn't work just peachy with a manual trans.

A while back I read a story about some guy that took an old porsche and replaced the gas engine with an electrification kit. Only he kept the manual gearbox. The result sounded pretty fun. That said, there's no reason one of those mild 48 volt systems that basically use the starter or alternator in reverse couldn't be used with a manual trans.

I kinda like lag myself. On my 2000 ranger that sports the T3 turbo off an 86 'bird, there's no boost at all until about 2100 rpm. But cruising at 2400 rpm, it's right on the threshold where the turbo can vary manifold vaccuum/boost up to about 5 psi just in response to engine load without really moving the throttle. It's great for floating hills. Just let the turbo match engine output to demand. The lag is really a non-issue. If you want to go fast, just shift later. No lag at all by 2800 rpm. Lag also makes it possible to hook. I'm making about the same power as a well tuned street cam'd 5.0HO windsor, but way faster than the V8 rangers that don't hook worth a ****.