GearheadGrrrl

Nothing and nobody is being held hostage- The plants are not occupied by the strikers.

Basicly this is two parties (union and company) negotiating a new contract to replace an expired contract. Within the law, either side has the right to withhold it's contributions or services until a new contract is agreed. Goes on in business all the time when supply contracts come due, leases expire, etc..

Withdrawing one's services is not extortion.

With BEV batteries in short supply and prices no longer dropping, it's becoming impossible to profitably build BEV SUVs and trucks at a price affordable to middle class buyers.

Lockout, fire and replace the strikers, etc. are tactics from an era of labor surpluses that won't work now. Volvo truck's other plant in Virginia voted down the contract a couple of times, workers are tired of Volvo treating them like second class autoworkers and Volvo's attempts to outsource chassis trimming and move medium duty assembly to a new non union plant have just made them madder.

Agreed, mom and dad's last house was barely 1000 square feet and was plenty roomy. I've got 1200 square feet plus a 600 square foot attached garage and it's more than big enough- In the winter I close off half the house and heat and comfortably live in 600 square feet. Same with cars- didn't have air conditioning and an automatic 'til 1998 and had only one 4WD/AWD vehicle in my life. Still ticked off that the manufacturers stick me with a bunch of unreliable gadgets I never requested!

So Ford, how about skipping the lift on an Escape so I can autocross it and tweak the Ecobeast 4. to more than 250 horses while your at it?

If they're able, they're working as hard or harder than my generation ever did. I say "if they're able" because two have Autism diagnosis, one after being held back by the sheltered sweatshops went to tech college and is now a cabinet maker, the other has been unable to work. Problem is, work doesn't pay like it used to and the price of almost everything has skyrocketed.

Workers lost the bargaining power they had from the 1940s through the 1960s. Dad was born in '21. mom in '27, me in '50, little brothers in '57 and '59. Dad got a job at the VA after serving in WW2 and mom worked in retail until I came around. They bought a new house in '54 and traded up to a bigger one in '57 with a big addition in '59. Dad got a better job in sales in '52 and bought a new Ford, got a better sales job with a new company car every couple years until he retired in the 80s. Bought a trailer towing spec LTD followed by an E350 diesel, E150 gasser when they parked the trailer on a leased lot in Florida, Taurus gasser, and Mopar minivan- all cash deals. Dad passed in 2001 and mom in 2008. leaving us the trailer, lot and about $200K. Graduated high school in '68 and had three job offers to choose from next day. Went to college in the fall and by the mid 70s the jobs weren't as easy to find and by the 80s the layoffs became frequent. Finally got enough seniority to get year round work then but my younger brothers entered the workforce in these challenging times and didn't have it as easy. Bought my 1st house at age 34 but it was really a share in a co-op apartment complex and 1st new car at 28, not quite keeping up with my parents. Inherited grandma's old house in '86 and finally bought a decent 20 year old house in 2010 for only $40K because it was in a tiny failing town. One younger brother bought mom and dads house but had to sell it and a couple more houses after work moved him around the country, he's retiring now and still making payments. Other brother bought a house, lost it, after renting bought another house and has 17 years of payments left at age 66. My brothers and their wives have provided me nieces and nephews to spoil, all in the 20s, still living at home, and driving 10-20 year old cars. Their economic reality is low wage jobs that will probably never allow them new cars and their own homes. For Ford and the rest of the big 2 and half they'll probably never be customers, even if their earnings increase they'll be shopping $20K cars not $50K and up F150s and Silverados. This is why Ford needs affordable cars and waiting a year for a $25K Maverick ain't gonna cut it.

Base model has similar powertrain to the Fusion Hybrid which wasn't a loss leader, about the same number of body parts but Maverick doesn't come with a trunk lid. If anything, adding for inflation, the Fusion would probably be more profitable.

Maverick has about the same price as the Fusion and more content in the case of the hybrid, so it's probably less profitable than the Fusion. Flat Rock has plenty of unused capacity. More likely manufacturers are simply choosing to specialize in market segments they're successful in.

"Sucking money out of your customers until they go bankrupt is not a sustainable business plan" The math is pretty simple- Ford has a relatively fixed number of employees and factories to keep busy and layoffs and plant closings don't cut those expenses much. So Ford needs enough volume and revenue to keep them working, raise prices too much and volume falls below a profitable point, price too low and Ford loses money too. Mercedes can get away with selling cars with six figure prices but not Ford, and both need to attract customers who aren't buying their last vehicle.

Good way to chase away a loyal Ford customer!

EPA, NHTSA, etc. are very popular agencies with the general public so politicians tend not to micromanage them. Throw in the fact that less than 20% of congressional districts are competitive and I doubt we'll see congress overrule NHTSA on these regulations.

Assuming the execs even had honest numbers to tell what vehicle was or was not turning a profit. I used to work for old Hostess that closed any bakery that lost money for month, but their accounting system was so simplistic they really had no idea what bakeries or products were making or losing money. Amtrak has a similar dysfunctional accounting system that piles overhead costs from facilities on the east coast on trains that run no further east than Chicago. Thus trains like the Empire Builder that have low overhead costs due to using older equipment and freight railroads track end up subsidizing the Northeast Corridor's Amtrak owned tracks and new trains like the Accela.

Ford's "small car problem" was that they tooled up three of them and Fiesta and Focus with the exception of the STs and RS sold on (unprofitable) price alone. Ford's "solution" was to kill off all three in the U.S. despite the Fusion selling at higher and profitable prices. GM was wiser and kept the Malibu around, what the heck the engineering and tooling was paid for so why not? So now GM is selling over 100K Malibus a year without even trying, while Ford is throwing their pet two row SUVs into a not real profitable commodity market...

A lot of Ford's quality failures are little faults that never get fixed like my 2022 Transit Connect's 2nd row seat fold down releases. Had one fail right after I bought it, Ford sent wrong part then two whole seat frames that didn't work out of the box. Other owners tell me this has been a problem throughout the outgoing Transit Connect's decade long model run, yet Ford still hasn't come up with a fix- Heck, they don't even have repair instructions in the service manual! Besides chasing away repeat customers, this is costing Ford serious $$$- Individual parts aren't available and shipping a whole seat frame from Spain to a dealer ain't cheap. At this point this unfixed failure has probably eaten up any profit Ford made on the vehicle and it's now eligible for a Lemon Law buyback... If this the way Ford cultivates customer relations?

M2s were always plasticy, got assigned a rental M2 one night around 2007 and couldn't find a power socket or even some bare metal to attach a ground clamp to so I could hook up my radios. As for the "pickup truck feel", that's scary- A big truck should let you know that you have to drive it with respect for it's high center of gravity and skinny tires!

At worst, just an expansion of the gas guzzler tax...

I've read the "superuser" study, problem is that an electric pickup won't work for many F150 owners because they tow a lot and that cuts range to below what these 30K median miles a year drivers can accept. For the Super Duty size superusers, the range reduction would make a BEV nearly useless.

Sadly, most Americans prefer to live in debt surrounded by supersized trucks and homes. Meanwhile, I and the rest of the world have gotten by just fine driving those 50 MPG cars and enjoying our modest homes, bought with cash...

You're making some questionable statistical assumptions of steady growth in EVs that seldom seem to work out in reality. Four decades ago the assumption was that the future of automotive propulsion was diesel and some truck makers even dropped their gas engines entirely. Then GM mass marketed a lemon of a diesel, gas prices relented, and by the late 80s there was hardly a diesel car left in production. VW and others cheated on emissions and killed the diesel cars resurgence in the US and Canada, but today worldwide diesel cars still have a respectable but shrinking market share, diesels often fill over half the engine bays in 3/4 and 1 ton trucks, and in 2 ton and heavier trucks Diesel engines dominate. Given the factors that can slow EVs growth like charging and price, it's entirely possible that EVs will dominate some markets like affluent home owners in Coastal "blue" states but sales may plateau for years as many buyers can't afford or conveniently charge diesel cars. We may be at the beginning of one of those plateaus now, or EV sales could trend downward and near disappear like new diesel cars did in the late 80s.

BEV sales have always relied heavily on subsidies- Traditionally the best sales months were towards the end of the year as buyers sought income tax credits and recently as some BEVs have lost credits their sales have declined.

Despite all the sentiment for them and subsidies, EVs for some very basic reasons have an uphill road to mass adoption. For the buyer they can't beat the cost of an IC- I've done the numbers and for a Bolt to match the lifetime costs of my VW diesels they'd have to subsidize the Bolt down to less than $10K out the door. As for the stated goal of reducing GHGs, until we have more renewable energy and a grid to distribute it, putting more EVs in the fleet just results in the GHG producing coal and gas fired generating plants running more and longer.

If those stats are so precise, how come the best and worst case scenarios get the same result?