iamweasel

I can tell you with certainty Freightliner has already signed up for it.

I know what they are, I just contend that "Active" is a stupid name for a trim level and having two "ST" anythings as trims on the same model is also a bad idea.

Wonder why they decided to name that trim level "Active." That just seems like a stupid name to me, especially since XLT is such a well known trim level that has always had similar content levels across models. Then you still have an "ST-Line" and an "ST?" C'mon....that's just marketing getting too cute. Those are too similar..... That being said, bringing down prices was a must with this model. It was over-priced to begin with and they had to issue large incentives so sell the volume needed, so these price adjustments help bring the MSRP closer to the real transaction prices.

Regarding the "Final Pay" - that never used to be some special incentive amount that guaranteed a quick sale. They would just give you a similar amount to what was offered at the time. We just did it so that we could stop managing incentives for a certain model year. For instance, right now 24MY's and 25MY's are being sold. When 26MY's come out, we'd do a flat pay on all remaining 24MY's and from that point going forward we'd only manage 25MY and 26MY. For about a year and a half I was on the team of 5 people who managed all the C&I programs. It was pure chaos because we had to manage not only the national programs but all the regional programs which made it complicated. (Also all the lease programs which was a nightmare.) The other big issue impacting the dealer margins is the spread between dealer cost and retail has been slowly getting squeezed over time. Dealer cost is going up at a faster rate than retail prices over the past 10-20 years so dealers make less per unit than before. Especially with the Big 3, there are too many dealerships close together in many areas which makes it easier for the customer to find that "Hundred Over Ford" dealer noted earlier. The COVID-era supply chain issues lowering factory output stopped that for a while, and even increased margins, but as things normalize again the dealer per unit margins will continue to fall when comparing apples-to-apples on a given unit IMO.

Many of them do rotations on the line as part of the program. (As I did right out of college....worked on the line at Michigan Truck Plant.)

And those folks on the line have every opportunity to get that engineering or designer job if they want.

It's not all on Ford to do themselves. Transporters are for-hire companies and it's a matter of hiring the right one and working together. Back when I was involved with that, there were bar codes on every vehicle and they'd get scanned in every time they moved locations/changed hands. I believe the data is there, but Ford just won't do anything about it even though they've had TONS of complaints from dealers and customers about the inability to get updates on where vehicles are. That's just Ford being cheap or not caring - don't know which is worse. Also, closing a sale before a vehicle hits a dealership is common practice and happens all the time with no issue. We do it all the time in our business, too. Many of our trucks don't even come to our dealerships. (Direct ship to the customer and/or body builder.)

The margins are why they had to abandon small sedans in the first place. (Or lack thereof in many cases.) Having a $2,000 cost disadvantage vs foreign makes is a death sentence on a small car versus a big margin F-150 or Expedition where you can deal with it a lot more.

Yeah, even with Japan and Korea the trade is one-sided. People always say "well Ford and GM didn't make the cars that people in those countries wanted." Well even if they did they would not be able to sell them in large quantities given the home turf protections in place. My old boss at Ford did a 3-year stint at Ford of Japan when that was still going and the stories he told were pretty amazing. (I actually knew about 10 people who did rotations over there and all had similar experiences.) Everyone would agree Toyota makes cars people want, right? Well guess what......in South Korea last year there were 1,720,919 cars and light trucks sold. You know how many Toyota sold? A whopping 8,495 units. Good for a massive 0.49% market share. (Honda was even worse....3,140 total sales.) Gee.....I wonder why 2 of the most reputable companies can't penetrate the market in South Korea? FWIW, Hyundai/Kia sold 1,325,737 units in South Korea....a 77% market share. Same issue in reverse.....Hyundai/Kia bailed out of Japan years ago due to awful sales and there were stories like this in 2022 but not sure what has happened since then. https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/south-koreas-hyundai-motor-take-fresh-crack-japan-sales-2022-02-08/ Bottom line is the US and Europe need to get a lot smarter with how international trade in the auto industry is done or there will be no US/Euro companies left in 50 years.

Yes Ford has had communication problems for decades but it's worse than ever now. They went from caring but just not being very good at it, to not caring at all and ignoring it. Agree on too many layers and short-term thinking being an issue. Part of that is just how things are set up. Ford has always had trouble recruiting top talent due to being in Detroit where nobody wants to live so they have to sell people across the country on how much better for their career Ford would be over other Fortune 500 companies due to how they develop their employees. It's true, and they do a good job getting you ready for upper management, but that tends to have people working there change jobs a ton and that constant churn, and lack of subject matter experts, does not help with overall efficiency. I worked at Ford in Dearborn for 13 years and had 10 different positions (6 promotions) in Manufacturing, Marketing & Sales and Product Development. Just as I got comfortable in a position I got moved to another. I never got bored and I never had too much junk in my offices because I knew I wouldn't be there very long. LOL.... On the order board, pretty sure my counterpart is on top of things but today he was telling us about how he ordered 6 exact spec F-150's for a customer. 4 were ordered initially then 2 were ordered a month later. 2 of the first 4 came in......and then the last 2 arrived before the 2nd pair from the first order. It makes no sense. They claim scheduling is FIFO but that is not really accurate. That's just a small example of how whacky things are. All I know is this guy has his crap together and he does not complain about his DTNA orders like he does with the Ford stuff.

Actually, it is. Ford can easily step-up and put together a system to track where trucks are while in transit. On our DTNA trucks with Detroit engines, I can goto our internal web portal and pull up a step-by-step chart of where the truck is in the process and even click a map and see where the truck is in real time. Ford just hasn't take the steps to provide something like this. (With Cummins we don't get a map but we do see the chart which has some basic info, and if I need more specifics we hit a button and an email gets sent to DTNA AND the transporter and they'll usually respond within an hour or two and tell me exactly where the truck is and what's going on with it. Even this would be a step-up from what Ford does....which is basically nothing.) On a funny note, one time I had one of our mexico builds coming across the country and I noticed it randomly stopped outside Atlanta GA for a few days. That is very odd as usually once it gets to Atlanta I'll see it later that day or the next depending on which of my locations it goes to. When you see a truck isn't moving usually it's because of a breakdown but the GPS signal was not anywhere near a Freightliner dealer. I was like what the heck is going on.....well the driver was from that area and decided to stop and visit family for a few days with my truck. LOL.....and yeah, he got in trouble for that. That's a big no-no.

Technically, yes Hino is still around from what my counterpart is telling me. They are only getting a handful of trucks per quarter promised to them. (But we'll see if they actually come through on that. They definitely have people wondering how much longer they'll officially be alive.)

Unless the US government radically changes their business policies then we will continue to let foreign companies have an advantage over domestic companies. This has been an issue for years. (Part of the reason why Ford/GM still can't compete with Japan/Korea on cost per vehicle.) It's pretty ridiculous that China makes non-Chinese auto companies sign 50/50 JV agreements with local Chinese companies to do business there, but on the flip side BYD can freely sell into Europe and/or the US with limited or no barriers? C'mon people....what are we doing here.

All of the above, honestly. Just seems like every high level decision lately isn't working out. But more importantly from the dealer side, the one thing that is much worse than before is the simple lack of communication regarding what's going on with production, scheduling, parts availability, product support, etc. All the basics of building cars and trucks. Ford seems to almost go out of their way to NOT help answer questions and find solutions to problems. The randomization of which orders get scheduled or cancelled and which ones get priority is a total cluster%$#@. My company has several OEM's and the only company we hate dealing with more than Ford is Hino.

I know a lot of Ford employees, some very high up, and I also know several Ford dealers (including my own company.) Not one person I know has anything good to say about Farley and the crew of execs running the company at the moment. The cumulative impact of 2 bad Leadership groups in a row (CEO's/Top Managers) is really starting to take a toll......

Daimler is ready. The Detroit's are further along than Cummins on these types of things already. They just don't want the new rules implemented due to how much it will impact the cost and quality of new trucks starting in 27CY.

GVWR doesn't have anything to do with it. At least in Class 3 and above, which is what I'm familiar with, there are no exemptions based on GVWR. It's basically whether or not your engine meets the new requirements in California and the Isuzu diesel and Cummins L9 don't make the cut. Engines like the Detroit DD5/DD8 and Cummins B6.7 passed the test. Also note there are still "CARB" certified trucks that are not allowed to be sold in California. At least with the way I am ordering our trucks, I have to choose between these 3 options: No CARB certification (To be registered in the other 45-49 states depending on which way the wind blows. For some states, like PA, you can't register a truck there if you do this.) CARB certified / to be registered in the other 49 states (Adds ~ $1,500 to the truck price. You need this option to get the Clean Idle Sticker. You can safely register these in all 49 states.) CARB certified / To be registered in California (Adds $12K more to the price than option #1. In addition, with DTNA they are only going to build so many of these engines this year so only dealers in California have allocation for this and it's in limited quantities.)

Who knows.....there are so many new rules in the process of implementation everyone is just confused across the board. CARB alone is bad enough then you add EPA, OmniBus, ACF into the mix it just makes it chaos. I'm just glad I'm not in California like you are. I feel for people who do what I do out there. It's a nightmare....

On the Daimler side, they tell us that it's the date of the engine is what matters. You can't build an engine in Detroit on 1/1 and ship it to North Carolina to be installed in a truck that same day, you know? (DTNA also flipped to 25MY starting 1/1/24.) So over the past 3 months theoretically you could have: 1) A 24MY truck with a 23CY engine 2) A 25MY truck with a 23CY engine (engine built a week or two before the year is over) 3) A 25MY truck with a 24CY engine DTNA really goes out of their way to avoid #2. They don't want to have any gray-area issues with the EPA/CARB, so they will start to produce their 25CY emission engines late in 24CY and time-it so any truck rolling down the line in 24CY gets a 24CY engine. I have had a few oddball trucks over the years like item #2, though. Those situations only happened when there was a production/supply issue of some sort that messed up the timing.

PACCAR has been particularly aggressive of late in the states I deal with. Their orders have dropped dramatically so they have a lot of build slots to sell and when that happens they will undercut everyone on price if they have to. PACCAR has always had the most volitile pricing. They claim to be some premium brand but they will get into the mud on pricing when they need to. Mack/Volvo, International and Ford may have slower order intake, too, but seems they have been struggling to get trucks built big-time and haven't reached the point where they've "caught up" to their pent up demand. Given that, they have been steady on the prices lately. With my FTL/WST business, on the FTL side we are still working through our backlogs, too, and I expect very limited availability for the next 12 months. Almost all our 24CY slots are spoken for already. On the Western Star side, we have far more availability - especially given they are increasing WST production by 30% in 24CY - but we are still pre-selling most of our slots so we have held our pricing steady. Sure we have lost some deals to PACCAR as they have gotten more aggressive, but we don't need to chase that right now. On class 8 dumps, over the past 2 years PACCAR was selling them for $280-300K around here and we were at $230-240K. In normal times, we would be around the same price as PACCAR so that just shows you how much they jacked their margins on everyone. For 24CY, they are now quoting those same trucks for $240-250K which is right where we are. On Class 6-7, they have been $3-5K under us lately.....and Ford is usually $5K below us.

I may have misunderstood what you were saying a bit, and if so, my bad.....and NO I do not consider those Chevy/International trucks premium in any way.

I don't think there would be enough of a market for "premium" trucks in Class 3-5. Those are very price sensitive segments and don't see a lot of buyers paying extra money for the GMC when they can get the Chevy. Even in class 6-7, there are some (PERCEIVED) premium products there (Paccar) but they don't carry nearly the market share as PACCAR's class 8 trucks do. Part of that is due to less demand for premium trucks in that segment and the other, quite frankly, is because there is nothing whatsoever that is premium about those medium duty PACCAR trucks. They are as cheap and plasticky as anything else in the segment and with their small cabs there really isn't anything special about them. (PACCAR can also undercut many of the other Class 6-7 brands on pricing, too, when they want to.)

I like it,,,but given Volvo is essentially Chinese now that is a hard NO for me......

Think I saw one the other day, too, and I believe it was a gas motor.....

Right.....no other state has the same rules as California right now. Oregon was following that path but then bailed out of some of the rules a few weeks ago. So as of now, at least the way we are ordering trucks, the groupings on the Daimler side are: 1) California - on its own island of rules (BIG Cost.....$10-15K added cost we have to pay the OEM for Cali registered trucks) 2) Oregon, Maine and Pennsylvania - must order a specific CARB certification for those states, but it only adds $2K cost to the trucks. With this certification, though, if the customer buys an extended powertrain warranty the cost of that warranty is lower than non-CARB certification so you can actually lower that $2K CARB penalty to $300-$500. 3) Everyone else, where you can do non-California CARB or non-CARB certification similar to option #2, and in most cases we are still doing the $2K CARB certification because you have to do that to get the clean idle sticker and the net cost increase is minimal when doing an extended powertrain warranty (which many customers do)