SoonerLS

Part of it, I'm sure, is that the foreign makers don't have unionized workforces, so they don't have to deal with the legacy costs and work rules that go with them. Also, that article only says that most of its models for NA sale will be assembled in the US; it says nothing about where the parts will be made before they're shipped here to be bolted together. If you're talking about making engines in the US, I'd bet that the cost of regulatory compliance alone in building an engine foundry in the US would be enough to justify keeping the Windsor plant open for years (while keeping it within compliance of Canadian regs). And that doesn't count the costs of re-establishing the well-established logistical systems that tie Windsor to the rest of Ford's supply chain. A Ford employee also told me that Hermosillo is Ford's top plant from a manufacturing quality standpoint, so I'm sure that has something to do with it, too...

Damn. Hit Quote instead of Edit...

My boss has been researching washers and dryers, and he said CR isn't even uniformly good at reviewing appliances. He was looking at their top-rated units, and all the consumer reviews he was finding were overwhelmingly negative--and many of them specifically called out CR. (I think he may have said there were complaints on the CR site, but I'm not sure if CR has feedback, so it may have just been other sites.) Personally, I've read enough of their automotive reviews that I don't trust them any more than I'd trust PETA's reviews of restaurants...

There are plenty of us out there. It's a truck guy thing--if you understand, no explanation is necessary; if you don't, no explanation is possible. What killed the Lightning wasn't so much a lack of sales (SVT was always limited production) as it was a combination of Ford burning out the SVT resources to get the GT out the door in time for the Centennial and SVT being effectively shut out of the F150's '05 overhaul program. (The retirement of John Coletti and the loss of his direction didn't help...)

My boss's brother is a pilot in the Marine Corps, and he pointed out another issue that turbines have: a 50,000 RPM rotating assembly. There's a reason they pay a lot of attention to the maintenance on their turbines--if it goes, you're gonna need a heck of a scatter shield...

I guess it depends on the bellhousing bolt pattern; if they use a common pattern with, say, the transmission in the T6 or behind an RWD D37, then it wouldn't necessarily be a unique powertrain.

If Dean is right and 330-350hp is in the ballpark, and the IRS and weight loss rumors are right, this could be one wicked machine. I'm guessing that an EB I4 will weigh less than the D37, so it should have a pretty good F/R weight ratio, to boot. Welcome back, Mustang SVO!

That's what it says in post #5 of this thread. It's entirely possible that there is a hail-damaged Escape on a dealer's lot (it's not like it has never hailed anywhere other than the Louisville lot), but it's highly unlikely that it came from that batch. It could, AFAIK, still be sold as new, but it should be discounted due to the near-certain insurance pay-out. I know we have a few dealers advertising "hail sales," trying to clear out the damaged cars left over from a big hail storm more than a month ago--one advertised a new "lightly hail-damaged" SHO for $32K that had me sorely tempted...

It's not like Ford is new to the 'loomnum body panel game--the Lincoln LS has plenty of aluminum body panels (pretty much everything forward of the A pillar, plus the deck lid), and it was launched in 1999. There was a minor problem with corrosion on the deck lid, but that, IIRC, was traced back to a contaminant (in the primer, maybe?) at the factory, not to a problem with the panel itself. My LS has taken more than its fair share of rocks and flying debris on the road, and the aluminum skins are still in excellent condition. (They're in better condition than the steel panels on my truck, but that's another story...) How many buyers are actually going to consider repairability of body panels? Very few consumers will, but how many commercial/industrial/agricultural buyers will?

Maybe, but that has nothing to do with what I was discussing.

I rode to lunch in a rental ('13, I think) Taurus several times about two weeks ago. I was only in the passenger seat, so I can't comment on the driving, but the seat felt OK to me (and I'm kind of a big guy, at 6'2" and, well, quite heavy). I do agree about the interior packaging; it feels much smaller inside than it looks on the outside (and that ginormous center console--which looks much bigger than the one in my parents' '05 Freestyle--doesn't help). It's a beautiful design wrapped around a not-awesome chassis (from a packaging perspective), IMHO. I liked the car very much, it just felt more cramped than it should, and I think it was due to the hip room (the legroom and headroom were both fine).

Double post...

As I understand it, the foundational concepts behind kaizen were "invented" by an American (whose name escapes me) who took it to the Japanese companies after the Detroit 3 ignored him. I'm not sure how innovative you can claim to be when you're really only applying what someone else taught you to do...

Headphone audio isn't line-level, it's a variable output. It's not going through much of an amp, but it is amplified.

Nine hours? Try more than 15-30 minutes. I don't know about where you live, but there's a hell of a lot of FM chatter around this part of the country; if you find a clear channel and move 20 miles (or less), you'll frequently run into a station strong enough to override an FM transmitter. It's even worse when I'm using my portable Sirius unit--its built-in FM transmitter is so lousy that Sirius (as settlement for a class-action lawsuit) sent me a free adapter that goes between the vehicle's antenna and radio...

I don't have two cables; I have an iPod A/V cable (Belkin, IIRC) that pulls the line out audio from my iPhone and sends it to the line in adapter that hijacks the audio feed from my Ford Sirius unt. For me, USB is only useful for that 12V to 5V cigar lighter adapter; it doesn't help me get clean audio in to my factory head unit. For getting audio into a head unit, line level audio >>>>>> speaker level audio >>>>>>>>>>> FM modulation, IMHO. I do agree with your main point, though--Apple does it for one reason: the almighty Dollar. To another pont raised elsewhere in this thread, everybody else uses micro USB on their phones because they want to sell in Europe, and the micro USB connector is a mandated standard in the EU (it wasn't that long ago that every blasted phone used its own (usually proprietary) connector). That's also why Apple sells/gives away the 30-pin to micro USB adapters in Europe--if they didn't, they wouldn't be able to sell iPhones in the EU.

It looks more like a poorly-executed knock-off of a mid-'90s Ranger interior. And, colors aside, that early-'80s interior looks better.

The EB35 never had any exclusivity for Lincoln. IIRC, the SHO hit the street before the EB MKS (and it was rated 10hp higher than the Lincoln).

According to the build site, the three engines are the 2.0EB, D37, and 2.0 Hybrid.

The funny part is that all those people asked "why don't they digitize it?" without reading the source material from Ford (http://media.ford.com/article_display.cfm?article_id=36811), which states that they do take laser scans of the interiors. It's not like Ford doesn't know the interior volumes of their own vehicles--it's not all that difficult to get accurate numbers from the software you use to design the things, after all--but the ping pong balls provide a standardized measurement they can use to compare the interior volumes of their vehicles with those of their competitors, and automating the counting of the balls is a trivial task. Or maybe it's useful as s**t work for engineers who've screwed up...

Thus far, the only media spin I've heard on the topic has been positive. (You know, the kind usually reserved for Toyota after they've spent years dragging their feet and finally given in to fixing the problem... ) For a rather severe (though limited) problem, it might actually be a positive for Ford--they're in the press, and they're doing their best to do right by their customers.

I don't see that at all. Everyone has something about his job that he doesn't like, and nobody likes to see his entire profession labeled as cheats and game-players. Dean has a valid point about the hypocrisy in some statements about how salesmen and dealerships play games in the car-buying process--some do, and I won't deal with most of the Ford dealerships in this region because of them--but those games get played on the buyer's side, as well.

Unless the X Plan rules have changed drastically, to use it, you have to tell the salesman/dealership up front that it will be an X Plan purchase. I don't see how you can comply with that requirement if you've already "ordered" your vehicle...

Then there was the time that their review said they couldn't figure out how to fold down the rear seats in a (IIRC) Mercury Mountaineer--this despite the instructions being in an illustrated label on the side of the seat. Right next to the handle for folding the seat. On the side of the seatback, where you normally find the handle for folding a seat. And I'm pretty sure it was visible in one of the pictures in their review...

Yeah, it is. That article reads like someone who's writing out of her depth; some of it sounds logical, but there are too many mis-statements. One could forgive the odd phrases like "platform capacity," but someone reporting for a financial operation should be able to figure out the ownership of a company. Hell, if you Google "Chrysler ownership," one of the first hits is a news piece from earlier this year about Fiat increasing its stake in Chrysler to 58%...