retropia

If gas prices stay in the $2.50 to $3.00 range, Ford is going to have a difficult time selling a $25,000 Focus, and even more so a $30,000 Focus-based Lincoln. Americans have always preferred big cars, big SUVs and big trucks, if gas is perceived to be affordable. The problem with CAFE is that it isn't market-based and it doesn't take these customer preferences into account. If gas remains affordable when the higher CAFE standards kick in, then it will be back to the bad old days. Manufacturers will be dumping the smaller, fuel-efficient cars into fleets at a loss, while charging premium prices on bigger vehicles that retail buyers really want. Maybe Ford has already factored this into its decision to make a small Lincoln, figuring its going to be the loss-leader fleet queen, allowing big profits to be made on Navigators and larger MK-whatevers.

Around here, the average Ford dealer experience is poor. From the advertising to the showroom interaction to the service department, the experience is subpar. Conversely, my Lincoln-Mercury dealer, where I take the Country Squire for service, always offers a great experience. They treat me with respect in the showroom, and they don't try to upsell me service I don't need in the service department. If my dealer goes away, I'll find an independent shop for the Squire, I suppose. There are reasons why Lexus customers are willing to spend thousands more for a tarted-up Toyota. Part of it is the upscale image, but I think the bigger part of it is the superb dealer experience. That's my biggest issue with Mercury going away, is that the dealer experience will also go away. Ford has already stated its intention of eliminating stand-alone Lincoln dealers, and I don't believe stand-alone Lincoln dealers will be able to survive without Mercury, anyway. Most new car dealers make the majority of their profit on used car sales and service. A dealer needs volume for those things. Even with more models, I don't see Lincoln-only dealers selling enough units to survive. Ford clearly starved Mercury of product over the last several years, which was obviously its plan to justify killing the brand. Perhaps Ford will succeed in converting former Mercury customers. Personally, I can't imagine setting foot inside a Ford dealer, no matter how nice the cars may become. If, somehow, Lincoln stand-alone dealers survive, and they continue down the path of selling rebadged Fords that are more attractive, at slightly higher prices, then I would consider Lincoln a possibility for future purchase. In that scenario, Lincoln would turn into what Mercury used to be.

Nice! Parts should be easy to find. I like TBirds, but they are complex beasts, with lots of electrical things that need fixing. Falcons are simple, and a good choice for a first classic.

My understanding is that it is difficult to engineer a unibody pickup. You end up with something like the Honda Ridgeline.

Remember the Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera and Buick Century made through 1996? They were virtually the same car made on the same assembly line. The Buick always ranked better on consumer-based surveys. A friend of mine at GM said the Buick also ranked as being higher quality, in internal GM studies. Those studies wouldn't have the consumer factor to explain the variability, as compared to external surveys. No one could ever figure out why the Buick fared better. There was speculation that the assembly-line workers took greater pride in assembling the Century, but it was only speculation. I don't have access to anyone at Ford to know how the Milan fares vs. the Fusion in internal studies.

I thought this 10/26/09 blog from David Leggett addresses some issues pertinent to Ford, especially as they prepare to release the Fiesta and Focus. Here are the first few paragraphs: I was in Detroit last week and I had a number of conversations in which the subject of small cars cropped up. It's a subject that is getting considerable attention at the OEMs and major suppliers in terms of anticipating future market trends. While there is a general consensus that car market segmentation globally is shifting toward more efficient and 'smaller' cars, there is considerable uncertainty about the pace of downsizing, how it will actually play out in particular markets and ultimately what it means for the auto industry. The thing is, while passenger vehicle market segmentation across the world may be undergoing a degree of convergence, there are still some pretty big differences out there. The full blog can be found here: Just-Auto.com

THIS is the engine Ford needs in all of its vehicles:

I think the original plan with PAG is that management finally realized that letting its car lines wither (with a focus instead on high-profit trucks and SUVs) meant that the brands had also withered. They figured it would be cheaper/faster to buy other, existing premium brands, on which they could make higher profits (conceivably), and then they wouldn't have to compete in low- to mid-level cars with the likes of Toyota and Honda. Lincoln was already a damaged brand, and someone probably produced a spread sheet that "proved" it would be cheaper to buy Volvo and Jaguar, than invest in Lincoln to try to restore its image. Jac and Wolfgang would have preferred it if Lincoln just went away.

Here's a set of three of them, at the Crawford Museum in Cleveland. I shot these photos in July. I'm guessing Crawford (the man) was able to get these cars for the museum because he was head of TRW; probably there was some kind of industry connection with Allegheny Ludlum.

Mazda has good engineers, too, especially in small vehicles. I wouldn't want to lose that connection, if I were Ford.

I never noticed it before, but it looks like the Cougar concept car is wearing rear-wheel-drive wheels. They don't have that FWD offset.

Does anyone else remember that the Probe was originally intended to be the next Mustang? At that time, the Fox platform was getting kind of moldy, Ford didn't want to put any more development money in it, and they thought a FWD Mustang based on a Mazda platform made perfect sense. I remember a big letter-writing campaign to Ford, urging them to not kill the "real" Mustang.

Caught cheating again . . . time to wear the old scarlet letter.

Here is a synopsis of the news report from Channel 4's website: COLUMBUS, Ohio—The Cash For Clunkers program, which ended early last week, has left car dealerships with a dearth of Dodges, a shortage of Chevrolets and a Lack of Luminas since dealers couldn’t recycle the used cars that were brought in as trade-ins. Chevrolet dealer Bob McDorman said used cars are now selling for about 20 percent higher than they were before Cash For Clunkers. Usually, cars that are traded in for new cars are resold by the dealership as used cars. “There’s six or eight of them back there I’d like to have on the used car lot,“ McDorman said. “They clunker deal has brought the price of used cars up. They’re now very hard to buy at the auction.“ Selections of new cars are also thin as dealers sold out of new car stock, and manufacturers who have laid off workers over the last few months didn’t have the inventory to keep up with demand.

There was a story on the local news last night about a local Chevy dealer who is running low on used cars to sell, thanks to Cash for Clunkers. He drove past a row of cars taken in on the clunkers deal, and pointed out several he wishes he could sell as used cars on his lot. He didn't say anything about problems getting paid by the government, but I know this problem is not unusual. The government is so afraid of fraud that they're requiring every "t" to be crossed and every "i" to be dotted.

Plenty of people spend even bigger money on hideous-looking BMWs, so I have no doubt people will buy this, too.

Modern unibody cars can be and are designed to be safer in an accident; the entire body can absorb impacts. The more impact absorbed by the car's body, the less impact is transferred to the bodies inside. However, this makes accident damage more expensive to repair. As the article mentioned, police repair shops find it relatively easy to repair accident damage on a body-on-frame car like the Crown Victoria. More safety is a good thing, but cash-strapped states and municipalities are likely to heavily weigh the costs to maintain and repair.

Vehicles like Flex and the new Taurus are no doubt part of Ford's plan to rebuild the brand's reputation in cars. There were many years where Ford let its reputation in cars slide, in order to focus on the profits generated in trucks and SUVs. It will take awhile to rebuild that reputation. As new Ford cars continue to improve, the general public will find it easier accepting higher prices on Ford cars.

From what I'm hearing around here, dealers are getting full sticker for the new cars they're selling under cash-for-clunkers, less any factory rebates. So the dealers are definitely doing well. And some of the trade-ins getting destroyed are quite decent. It seems like a real waste.

Or, perhaps Crown Vic and Kia drivers simply don't have "I'm trying to compensate for my shortcomings with what I drive" issues?

I bought a new Geo Prizm made at NUMMI. I was able to buy it as a discount, but not as steep a discount as other GM cars with similar MSRPs. It was every bit as reliable as a comparable Toyota. The Prizm never sold particularly well, whether with a Geo or Chevy brand. Neither brand had the Toyota cachet. I suspect GM didn't make much money on them, because they had to cost more to build than, say, a Cavalier, but they couldn't charge Corolla prices because it didn't have the Toyota name. Changing the GM NUMMI product to the Vibe was an attempt to make it more profitable, except GM discovered no one would pay Toyota prices for a Pontiac, either.

I get these test drive offers by mail or e-mail; "come in and test drive one of our cars and we will give you a gift certificate." Usually it's somewhere between $30 and $50. I like gift certificates and I like test driving cars, so what could be bad? The last ones I received from Jaguar, Lincoln and Mazda (the Jaguar one was back when Ford still owned them), the routine went like this: I go in, say I have a test-drive offer, and the salesman asks, "Are you here just for the gift certificate or are you really interested in buying a new car?" I'm honest and say I'm not in the market for a new car at this time, so they sign the offer without asking me if I'd like to take a test drive anyway, and off I go. Maybe I don't look prosperous enough to be in the market for a new car, and/or they don't want to waste their time on me if I'm not really ready to buy. When I receive these offers from Hyundai, they ALWAYS make me take a test drive, which is fine by me. They don't treat me as if I'm wasting their time.

I think it would be best if Lincoln dealers were separate from Ford dealers, following the Lexus/Toyota model. There are customers willing to pay extra for a premium experience. It is difficult to maintain that premium experience for Lincoln with Ford cars and trucks in the same showroom. If kept in separate dealerships, then it seems most practical to keep Mercury as the sister brand to Lincoln, to provide the volume sales. There are customers like me who don't mind paying a little extra for a Mercury, even if it is only a rebadged, slightly better-looking Ford, in order to get the premium dealer experience. It is harder to find customers willing to pay a lot extra for a Lincoln that doesn't have much product differentiation from its Ford stablemate. I hope that as Ford the corporation gets back on its feet, it can find the funds to create fewer Lincoln models that are more unique. Let Mercury have the (upscale) clones that provide the volume sales at Lincoln-Mercury dealerships.

To date, I haven't seen an MKS on the road in Central Ohio. Perhaps they are more of them in the further-out suburbs, where I rarely drive. I did see my first Flex on the road, maybe a month ago.

30 years from now they'll be laughing at some of today's stylin' rides, like a gigantic SUV rolling on 20" chrome wheels with spinner hubcaps, blue headlights and chrome cattle catcher bars. They'll say, "What were those crazy people thinking?"