97 F350

Good idea till the end. Buybacks are a waste of money. Pay off debt or throw in back into product development. Both would help stockholders more long term. Only get a short-term bounce from a buyback. There are a lot of companies that wish they had the money right now that they spent propping up their stock over the last few years only to watch it crater anyway. Didn't Ford do like a $5 billion buyback a few years ago - just think if they had redesigned the Taurus instead of letting it languish.

Actually the discussion is - should the Mustang always have a V8. Then you chimed in with: That is what I replied to, so it is quite the same. Now you have since backpedaled some from your initial position. And I do think that "giving" a kid ANY car (not just a Mustang) is an issue. If a kid works hard and earns his/her own vehicle - I think there is NO irresponsibility factor on the parent. In fact just the opposite. Plus odds are, if the kid is paying for it, not many burger-flipping jobs pay enough these days to drop 50g on a Super Snake. In all likelihood, it will be a four or six banger. But if they found a used GT and restored it themselves to safe driving condition - no problem. (Of course - they are also going to be paying for insurance - all part of the deal) Not sure what someone in a Mustang did to you in the past that you have such a hatred for this one car. It is just as appropriate a first vehicle as many other cars out there. Or do you also go to Honda boards and say the Crx and Civic are inappropriate vehicles for kids? After all, slap a nitrous kit on them and with their under 2000 lbs weight - you can blow the doors off a Lambo. Just ask anybody on a tuner forum and they will all tell you they have all done this. What exactly is your ideal first car? Is it the Sable? I would worry about that one - my uncle had either a 92 or a 94 Taurus. He was driving it in and at a light saw smoke coming out from under the hood and pulled into a parking lot to watch it burn up. Now would a 16 year old going highway speed know how to handle a car-be-cue? So in other words, we should listen to the back-seat driver on how we need to raise our children? Did the kids who needed a public defender get in that position because of the Mustangs they drove? Or was it by chance their environment growing up, or the parents who weren't around, or the poverty they grew up in? Nope gotta be the &*$% Mustangs that did it.

Good grief. Another know-it-all telling everyone else how to raise their kids. Since you are such a parenting authority, how many have you raised to be successful adults? A good example of a kid getting a Mustang as there first car is a kid who gets a job and buys it themself. Or restores an old Mustang. They will take far better care than a kid who gets one as a gift. I don't think kids should be "given" cars in the first place. If one of my daughters gets a job and works her tail off and wants to buy a Mustang, I will help her get the best deal she can. Or if one of them actually helps me when I am working on rebuilding one of my Mustangs - she might be able to earn her way into it. None of them is guaranteed a car just for residing under my roof. If they need to get somewhere, they will. If they "want" to - then we will talk. My first car was a 80' Mercury Capri. Second car I bought when the Merc rusted out my junior year in high school was a Renault Encore. I did a lot more stupid things in the French tin can than I did in the Merc. Is it safer to give a kid an Explorer or 4x4 that can be flipped easier? I am constantly amazed at how people drive these vehicles - they think they are in a sports car and then sue Ford when the vehicle rolls. It depends entirely on how you raise your kids and on the kids individual personality. I have one daughter who is incredibly responsible and cautious. Her sister is the complete opposite - dives off the top bunk, can't keep track of anything unless it is tied to her. All this will be factored into the equation when they are looking for vehicles. Not some silly edict by the Grand Poobah of Holy Governmental Temple of Parental Wisdom. :rolleyes: Oh, and to get this thread back on track. There should ALWAYS be a choice of a V-8 in a Mustang. Otherwise you have a Probe and that was such a success. :rolleyes:

This makes sense as like I said - Toyota, Honda, Nissan even BMW lots are absolutely stuffed - barely anyplace for customers to park. Is this part of Ford's way of right-sizing their dealer network without the bad PR way that GM and Chrysler did? I understand the need to cut floor plan costs - but wouldn't Ford's competitors be subject to the same pressure? And interesting aside - ignoring the CJD dealer that closed a month ago, only two of the probably 25 dealers I pass daily have closed recently. A Mazda that had a location for years, built a nice pretty new dealership about two blocks north, had a grand opening and then closed within the month. And a Hyundai dealership that is about 2 years old. A salesman from the F/L/M dealer next door said they bought the location - wonder if they are going to split out Lincoln/Mercury as they barely have any on their lot.

So the movie is what caused this truck to fade into obscurity. I'm thinking the Shelbys etc. are going to get a run for their money at Barrett Jackson's................................... not. Seriously - never heard or seen this and I live in Texas - that hotbed of Toyata truck-ness. :rolleyes:

Was there really such a thing??? Any pics? Never seen or heard of this.

But they had to hit a certain number of words to with the article to get paid. (used to be column inches) So what other banal explanatory filler could they put in to pad the total length? Does Hyundai have any plants here? If not, then doubtful - what is the prevailing South Korean wage rate?

Makes sense, when we were looking at new Taurus X's - local dealer was going to get them from affiliated dealer on other side of town. We couldn't even test drive a new one because there wasn't one to be found within 40 miles. But why does it seem to be mostly Ford dealers? (purely anecdotal evidence I know)

I have a 30 mile one-way commute daily. I pass a dealership of just about every single brand offered for sale except Rolls, Bentley, Lambo, Audi and Subaru. 3 separate Ford Dealers. And two of those dealers are very empty. One is full as always, the one about 2 miles from me is "hollowed out" - vehicles at the front of the lot and lining the driveways - but nothing in the middle - basically a big empty square of vehicles. The one by my work has nothing but used cars on the new vehicle side. But all the others (Chevy, Honda especially, Toyota, VW) are stuffed with vehicles. I know that Ford has cut production to reduce inventories over the last year, but this looks like it goes beyond that. What is going on? And are the other manufacturers still producing at full steam?

It looks a lot better in person than in the pictures.

Both the U.S. and Canada's growth rates are only about .9% If you back out immigration to both, Canada's natural growth rate is about .3% and the U.S. is about .6%. Their one-child policy is effective to an extent, but there are many, many ways around it. Rural families can have two if the first is a girl. You can pay what basicaly amounts to a fee to have another child - well within the means of the middle class in the cities. Plus the growth rate is an official gov't number. And I can tell you from personal experiences to take any number/claim from official Chinese document with a grain of salt. I would guarantee there is undereporting all the way up the chain from the county thru the provincial level in order to meet goals. The other reason that such a growth rate in China is needed is to keep the people happy. If they are wealthy, they do not care so much that they are tightly controlled in other ways. And something on the order of 300 million people have migrated over the last 15-20 years from rural subsistance farming to the industrialized cities. And the migration is still going on and all those people expect have to be absorbed into the workforce or they get pissed and break stuff. Chinese. Just like moose.

ooops. Double-post.

Nope. They need to rebadge the Routon as the new Chevy Astro. They've been out of the mini-van market far too long.

Does anybody else think the Tundra looks like the Chevy one?

That is good to hear another testament to the reliability. We went ahead and pulled the trigger on an 2006 SEL fwd with not quite 52k miles. Just waiting on wrapping up the financing with my credit union and they are fixing a couple of cosmetic blips. Hopefully will pick up tomorrow. Got the 4 year/48k mile Ford ESP warranty. That should get us to 100k miles with minimal troubles. Sad to see the old Windstar go. It still looks great inside and out - just issues were starting to pop up and with the miles it had, was worried about repeats of the head gasket and transmission problems we had at about 85k miles. But I think the Freestyle looks pretty good for a kiddo-hauler. Guess I will be lurking a bit on Myfordfreestyle.com.

Well, I went to test drive the Freestyle yesterday. I had looked it over and the sales rep and I were getting into the car to drive away and the used car manager caught us and said "It's sold." $%&*(O!! The car only had 7695 miles for an 06! Thanks everybody for your replies though - good to know that its a pretty-trouble free car as we didn't find out the Windstar's common problems until we already owned one. Then we pretty much went right down the list. There is another one we are thinking of looking at. It has about 56k miles - a little more loaded. Only thing we don't like is it has leather seats. We want cloth because we have two child seats which are murder on leather upholstery.

We are looking at a very low mileage 2006 Freestyle. It has the CVT. I thought I read somewhere here that you didn't want the CVT. IS that correct? What were the problems with it? I've tried searching and can't find the thread I was thinking of. Are there any other problems with the Freestyle? Thanks.

13. A really stripped-down lightweight (rear seat delete, PW, PD, etc.) - lighter than the GTS from the mid-90's.

Still trying to figure out if we can take advantage of the clunker bill. Per the fueleconomy.gov website, our 2001 Windstar gets 18 mpg combined. Since as far as I can tell, a mini-van is considered a Category 1 truck, so in order to get $3500, we need to find a replacement that gets 20 mpg or better. We need a seven seater, so the choices are limited. The only one we have found so far is the VW/Chrylser mini-vans - we have to get the top of the line so we can get the optional 4.0 V-6 in order to get the mileage. But when were at our local CDJ dealer last week, he ran the VIN on our minivan and it came back as 17 mpg. So this would let us get a minivan with a lower trim package and the base engine since they get 19 mpg. I was able to glance at his printout of our van and it said we had a 2000 Windstar - which does get 17 mpg. The build date on our door sticker is either January or February 01 which would be 2001 MY. Does anybody know of a website that I can look up our vehicle by its VIN??? If we do in fact get 17 mgp - then we can get a Flex - which I finally go my wife to look at this weekend - and now SHE LOVES IT! She thought it was going to be a LOT bigger than it was plus the way it was advertised - she thought it was aiming for young male market - not the minivan-needing crowd.

That's interesting. Around here, all the dealers seem to be waiting until July 24. Supposedly that's when the official regulations come out. I've had 3 or 4 tell me this. Nobody seems to want to do anything until then - they seem to be scared that they will get it wrong and then have to eat the difference in the clunker cash and what the trade it is worth. On the fueleconomy.gov site, my wife's windstar was rated at a combined 18mpg. But a dealer pulled up some numbers using the VIN and it came back with a 17 mpg. I would think the VIN method would be more reliable, but his printout also said my wife's minivan was a 2000 model, not a 2001. The 1 mpg does make a difference - because it would let us get a Taurus X or Freestyle which only come in at 19 mpg.

Didn't Ford try this a few years back with Jaguar? Does that mean that Mahindra will be the ultimate builder's of Camero's?

Who is the target market? Last time I was over there, I didn't see a single mullet.

Sorry - screwed up - was relying on what the VW guy told me about his vans over the phone. Of course this is the same salesmen who spent almost the entire time bitching and whining about the clunker bill and the clunker program that Texas offers. Kept saying how they were biased against VW and were so unfair. What was funny, was most of his information was wrong. But I have to admit - have never encountered that sales tactic before - whining about the program that brought a prospect to him in the first place. We actually went and looked at them yesterday - unfortunately, thestore was closed. But we could see the seating for three in the back seat. We are going back tonight if I get off work in time in order to see how the girls booster seats fit in back - if there is still room for a third person with two boosters. Totally amazed at the sales dudes lack of knowledge about his product though.

But how do you stop from lowering them constantly at the drive-thru at Chick-Fil-A? Other than by letting the driver window motor break and being slow to fix it......... It is good to hear some high mileage stories since all I have been seeing is how bad the Windstar was.

Does this apply to rebates also? Or does the X plan preclude rebates if offered on a vehicle?