GearheadGrrrl
-
Posts
685 -
Joined
-
Last visited
-
Days Won
2
Content Type
Profiles
Forums
Gallery
Downloads
Store
Posts posted by GearheadGrrrl
-
-
Ford needs a freakin' plan, like VW Group, Toyota, and all the other world class automakers.
Every year or so Ford wheels out the latest "plan" in hopes of impressing the investment community, but Ford's real de facto plan is an over reliance on pickups and panel vans protected by the 25% "Chicken Tax" Tariff that should have gone away the better part of a century ago. On a world scale that's a single digit niche market, and even in the vast big BOF pickup sanctuary that is the U.S. most new housing doesn't come with F series sized garages, if they have garages at all.
Ford needs to make a plan and implement it while they still have capital available and before the vultures of bankruptcy circle...
-
Ford is playing this well- By making progress in negotiations they've set the terms of the contracts GM and Stelantis will have to agree too, but without the expense and disruption of a larger strike. Ford has figured out that inflation is raising the wage floor, may as well go along with UAW's reasonable demands and avoid the drama GM and Stelantis are inviting.
-
1
-
-
Ford Europe will be offering the hybrid Ranger as a 2025 model too, I like it: https://twitter.com/FordNewsEurope/status/1704012443335164159
-
Hourly pay is the same in Package Car as Feeders (tractor-trailers) but Feeders is a lot less physical work and less stressful, downside is Feeders is mostly night work. Some Feeder runs are on mileage pay but they get hourly pay for non driving work so those runs can be quite lucrative. Suffice to say, you usually need several years seniority in Package Cars to bid in to Feeders so many prefer Feeders even without a pay boost.
-
While you're sorta walking something higher than a sedan seems easiest to get into and out of, but for wheelchair users a sedan works better because it's seat height is closer to that of a wheelchair enabling horizontal transfers. A strong armed wheeler can pull themselves up. a couple inches, but most SUVs and pickups will need a $10K pivot and lower seat for them to get in. A 2 door coupe is better than a 4 door because the long door lets the wheeler put their folded wheelchair behind the front seats.
That's why a lot of wheelchair users buy Mustangs or hang on to old 2 door coupes, and Ford has forgotten them.
-
One strategy Ford should pursue is rural markets and applications like heavier trucks where electrification may never be viable. I live in one of those areas and the nearest non big-3 is dealer 70 miles away so Ford already has best position in this market, after the imports drop all their IC vehicles Ford is very well placed to dominate this IC market that will be around for decades.
-
3 hours ago, Rangers09 said:
Sadly, even hydro is being negated by the prolific complainers/protesters. We are > 98% renewable, mostly because of our numerous dams. However, the new dam coming online next year is probably the last one we will be able to build.
If we can't build more dams, I am hoping to see on/offshore wind farms, run of stream generating and tidal generating capacities expanded. Away from the coast, they can also use solar, with lack of sun at night not an issue for us, as we have loads of water behind the existing dams for night time.
The environmentalists opposition to hydro power is historic- One of their seminal groups, the Sierra Club, lost an early battle to stop a dam and they haven't forgotten it!
-
3
-
-
After hydro, wind is the best investment in renewables- unlike solar they don't go dead at night and produce megawatts of power from a small footprint. There's a couple gigawatts of wind power within 50 miles of my home and it's been a real boon to the economy- Especially for the county of less than 5000 with so-so cropland and no tourist attractions. With the tax revenue from wind power they can maintain their highways and a system of county parks that is the envy of larger counties. Meanwhile, farmers are as successful as ever raising crops and livestock under the wind turbines.
-
For EVs to work charging will have to be as available and fast as gas stations provide.
Friday I day tripped almost 400 miles to a threshing show, left at :30 before dawn, enjoyed 6 hours of steam and other old tech in action, and got home 15 minutes before sunset. There are reputedly two charging stations in a town midway on my route, would have had to stop both ways and had to cut my day short or get home after dark. Either that or take a long route to pass by more chargers and cut more into my time at the threshing show or drive more after dark. Worse yet, if the two charging sites 100 miles out were down I would have had to head home, not wanting to wander farther than I'd have charge to make it home.
Most of these rural chargers are heavily subsidized, are really used, and they'll become even rarer as they fail and will cost more to repair than they'll produce in revenue. This is why elecrification will take decades out here if it ever happens and we will need IC and PHEV cars for the foreseeable future... Automakers, please don't take away our mobility by forcing us into EVs!
-
1
-
-
33 minutes ago, DeluxeStang said:
EV adoption will be slower in rural areas, but it's already starting to happen. I stopped to get gas in Fillmore, UT on the way to Vegas. There were Tesla charging stations. Fillmore is about as rural is you can get ?.
Fillmore's on an Interstate, I'm 40 miles from an Interstate.
-
1
-
-
In rural areas which we all travel through the numbers just don't work for charging stations. I'm in a small town at the intersection of two state and federal highways with a combined traffic count of around 5000 a day. Nearest spot with traffic counts this high is at least 20 miles away so this should supposedly be a good spot for a charging station. Problem is there's nowhere near 100 EVs within those 20 miles and most of them are PHEVs. Our town get offered grants for 50% of the cost of a charging station, but they don't include the cost of upgrading over 20 miles of old power line to feed the charging station. Even a bare bones installation would be over $100K and we'd have to come up with over half of that, or $50K plus incidentals like a bathroom, etc.. That $50K is more than our towns annual budget, and getting caught up on street, park, and utility maintenance is clearly a higher priority. And we're in better shape than most of the small towns out here...
Fact is, rural; areas won't be able to support EVs for decades, if ever.
-
1
-
-
Given the incredible multi billion dollar cost of bringing a comprehensive line of IC and EV vehicles to market, the Ford+VW deal that both companies are trying to escape makes a lot of sense now.
-
Not hard to explain... Ford's DNA favors conservative decisions although every once in a while they let something like the Mustang and GT slip through. Meanwhile, GM gambled on the Corvette, Corvair, Toronado/Eldorado, etc.. So a seven decades later GM has survived bankruptcy and Corvette has evolved into a state of the art mid engine sports car while the Mustang soldiers along and will probably be competitive thanks to Multimatic and the ACOs and IMSA's intake and weight tweaks.
-
Tooling up a big block pushrod V8 in this day and age was questionable leap of faith to start with, putting that work truck motor in a "sports" truck is a leap too far.
-
I hope this is just a bargaining position to be sacrificed in contract negotiations. Couple years back when Ford justified killing the sedans/hatches with the argument that they'd become commodomized and unprofitable, I argued that in a couple years crossovers like the Escape would get commodomizaed too... And here we are.
-
6
-
-
-
With clever synergistic application of Sync and PHEV power Ford has produced a camper van that is way more than the sum of it's parts... https://fordeurope.blogspot.com/2023/08/all-new-ford-transit-custom-nugget-camper-van.html
-
3 hours ago, fuzzymoomoo said:
That’s the union leadership. Much different feeling on the plant floor.The initiative came out of a rank and file environmental committee.
-
UAW is a pretty progressive union- The local at the St.Paul plant lobbied for an EV to be built there over a decade ago.
-
It may be one of the greatest muscle cars of all time, but the Mustang is too damn big and heavy to be amongst the greatest sports cars of all time, even after some steel gets replaced with carbon fiber. 800 horses give massive bragging rights, but probably less will get to the ground that the ZO6's horses and the Z06 is lighter. Keeping the GTD headed in the intended direction may be a challenge too, with the heaviest parts of the powertrain at opposite ends of the car. But heck, we may never know where exactly this Mustang sits in the performance car pecking order, as it's not homologated for racing and if Ford thinks it's an embarrassment, they just won't let the press do a full road test and let the bench racers inflate the GTDs performance with every retelling...
This is at best a $200,000 car, and only if the buyer is a Ford fanatic with the blinders on to everything else.
-
1
-
-
The H and heavier N series were badly compromised designs- No proper suspension seats on the H and on the heavier N series the cab had to be removed to do an engine rebuild. They were rapidly replaced by the much improved W and Louisville or customers simply deserted Ford for other brands with better trucks.
-
BTW, VW's research company is trolling social media trying to catch full size pickup owners opinions... Maybe they're gonna do a pickup off the Scout EV?
-
7 minutes ago, silvrsvt said:
Thats all you can come up with?!
Don't get me started...
You can't outrun physics, and the Mustang is a big heavy car even after some of the steel panels have been swapped for carbon fiber. And while half that weight on the drive wheels is an improvement, the Corvette and other mid engine cars have more. And given the difficulty even some very expert drivers had getting the GT500s horsepower to the ground, will another hundred horses really be an improvement.
Fastest Mustang ever, maybe the best... But still just a Mustang.
-
1
-
-
Assuming it's capable of such performance. Motor Trend just published a road test of the S650 Gt\Y and it's overall no faster than the previous version. All that carbon fiber is nice, but an 8 speed dual clutch transmission is probably damn heavy and how much of those 800 reputed horses can be put to the pavement, even with half of what is still probably a near 4000 pound Mustang's weight on the drive wheels.
What Customers Really Want
in Ford Motor Company Discussion Forum
Posted
rperez817, you are correct that BEV adoption will only require a couple decades for the people who BEVs will work for, who can deal with a BEVs limitations, and can afford them. That BEV demographic is a shrinking slice of the American populace, for a start we've got a couple hundred million drivers but new car sales tend to average only about 15 million a year, so we can't even electrify 10% of the fleet per year. BEVs tend to be expensive which means they're out of consideration for a few million buyers a year and aren't available in several market segments which knocks a couple million more buyers out of the potential BEV market every year. Throw in the sizable chunk of apartment dwellers who may not even have off street parking or the drivers who need to travel in rural areas and the BEV market shrinks even more. So we're down to a maximum BEV conversion of maybe 5 million vehicles a year, and probably another 5 million drivers who will never be able to make the transition to BEVs.
And what the heck was this great transition to BEVs going to accomplish- Reducing Green House Gasses and climate change?
Best we can hope for is maybe 5% of the fleet switched from internal combustion to EVs per year, and with typical grid mix of renewables only running 20% to 40% at best and considering that most of the replaced ICs are Priu and such instead of the big belcher ICs, were talking maybe a 1% reduction in GHGs per year... Which will be overwhelmed by economic growth.
So what the heck are all these BEVs accomplishing?