iamweasel

The issue with the California regs is there are multiple regs in that same state, and they each bring different rules to the table making it extremely complicated and almost impossible to understand/coordinate. There are CARB rules, Omnibus low NoX rules, Advance Clean Fleet (ACF) rules, Advance Clean Trucks (ACT) rules, Clean Truck Check reporting, etc. With truck orders for next year, we can bascially pick 3 certification levels on each truck: 1) No CARB certification 2) 49-state CARB 3) California CARB Due to OEM's needing to meet both California regulations and nationwide EPA requirements, on the Daimler side, they basically have given the dealers 2 groups of slots to order for 24CY: A bucket of slots where you can do #1 or #2, and then another bucket of slots to get #3. (Those trucks with #3 will cost $10-15K more than the trucks with the #2 certification.) On top of that, there were new rules issued that changed what trucks can/can't be run through California. For instance, we sell to a large body builder in California and now they are saying any truck that gets upfitted there, even if it will be registered in another state, will need the #3 certification. That will absolutely destroy the competitiveness of that body builder versus their competitors in other states. They might as well pack up and move their business to Arizona or Nevada. So that being said, for the group of slots my company has to build #1 and #2 certifications, we are looking to transfer those slots to our Arizona stores and have the trucks invoiced out of those stores to bypass all this crap in California. It's an absolute $%#@ show....

As one of the special Heritage products, the Mustang gets a bit special treatment when it comes to analyzing vehicle profitability. It isn't held to the same standards as other vehicles. A single shift plant is a killer for the vehicle line P&L because the fixed costs of running that plant are allocated against fewer units, but not much they can do about it right now since 2 shifts worth of Mustangs would be far more than market demand. (And they don't produce anything else at Flat Rock to share the cost burden.)

Well Bo did lose 70% of his big (bowl) games so Hackett did bring Bo's losing ways with him to Ford.

Well that's sad to hear. One of my best friends was fairly high up in Manufacuring at Ford until a few years ago - he was always the one with the inside scoops at all the plants. (He was on a long-term personal mission to get Chicago closed and he says it's his biggest career regret that place is still running....LOL.) That being said, he, and some others I knew, used to say good things about Flat Rock outside of the building itself. Maybe things have gone downhill in the past few years.

That plant design stinks. It's small and chopped-up inside. It's always been a good running plant with good people, too, and Ford has had so many ideas for what to do there but.... ...then the Ops folks go "oh, you can't do this there" and "you can't do that there" so it just seems to have no grand plans for it. I was told years ago if it wasn't for environmental concerns (and cost I'm sure) they'd tear it down and re-build a plant the right way on the same land.

Good. If you're going to pay premium wages then you better get premium performance. When I was a line supervisor, I had one lady who was buddies with the nurse in the medical office. She was constantly asking to goto the bathroom or said he had a headache, etc. Every time she got a break she would just go into the medical office and chit chat. My floater, who was supposed to cover 20-25 stations, was seemingly on her station all the time due to her taking so many breaks. After trying to reason with the lady it was clear she was just someone who didn't give a crap as long as she got paid. (To not get in trouble the medical nurse would issue her tylenol or some other BS "prescription" and after going through her records she had something like 300 prescriptions in the last 100 days. LOL....) So I spent a weekend reading through the "rules" and then on that Thursday (I was doing C-Crew at the time) I got the page from her station 15 minutes into the shift. I'm mumbling to myself "what now" and walked up to her station and of course she wants to use the bathroom. I look her right in the eyes, say okay, click a button on my watch, walk away and note the request time in my pocket notebook. (Prior to that, I'd normally page the floater right then and ask him to come over but this time I didn't do that and she noticed.) 10mins later she pages me again. I walk over and she starts yelling at me that she has to goto the bathroom. I say okay again and walk away. 10mins later same thing....but this time she starts yelling at me as I'm walking away but I ignore it. Then after one more page I finally get the floater over to her station around 44 minutes after she asks to use the bathroom. and note that in my Every time she needed a break I'd do the same thing. Fast forward a week later and I get called into the Assistant Plant Manager's office and the UAW committeeman is there. She filed a formal complaint against me and I was charged with not letting her have required breaks, etc. The committeeman was a loudmouth and after ranting for a while I simply said "per rule # XXX we must offer relief within 45 minutes of the request", whip out my notebook, and show them both the notebook with the request times and what time the floater got there - all within 45 minutes of each other. The committeeman was speechless. LOL..... Good times....but even after me that lady kept working the system to get paid as much as she could and work as little as she could. Those are the types of line workers where rules are needed to get rid of them faster. (Note 98% of the line workers were great. There was just a small group of people that were like that.)

Part of the issue with the Edge is that it was built in Oakville, which has always been at the top of the list for the "what plant do we close next" crowd inside Ford. Between labor issues, exchange rate complications and land/facility issues at that plant I'm surprised it's still going, honestly. All the "do we close it or not" proposals running through the company over the years tends to scare away the strategy planners from allocating funds to those models for refreshes/new launches. That's part of the reason it didn't get a lot of changes over the years.

You are 100% correct that line workers and the plant's themselves get too much blame on quality. A high majority of vehicle issues are NOT due to plant assembly. (Spent 3 years of my Ford life digging through JD Power and Consumer Reports surveys, warranty claim data, etc, so trust me.....I know. I also spent a year in an Assembly Plant - Michigan Truck - and also got involved in a lot of that.) That being said, the flip side is that means the line workers are far from the company's most valuable asset. (And yes, I have worked line jobs, too, so I know EXACTLY what it's like to do those jobs all day.) Those job's for the most part can be done by any average joe in any state/country. So many of the jobs are "poka yoke'd" (to borrow one of my grad school buzz words LOL) and just about anyone can do the jobs. (Look up the word if you want, I could use another word for what I wanted to say but it was not very polite.) Bottom line is Ford would shut down every plant tomorrow and move to the south and/or Mexico if didn't cost a zillion dollars to build a whole new plant network. (Well truthfully Ford may not really do that as I said previously the Ford family is far too nice for that, but I'd bet GM and Stellantis would have no issue leaving the midwest behind if they could.) It is not hard to find people to do those jobs. Just look at all the new plants in the south - none of them have a hard time getting workers because most of the positions do not require any special skills so the available labor pool is huge. I do not say this to be disrespectful as I still work in the industry and respect how hard everyone works. I'm just being honest in my opinion. Good engineers, designers, operations folks, etc are the ones who ultimately decide whether a given vehicle is a success or not, and those positions are much harder for the auto companies to fill.

So your source for why Hackett is good is an advertisement from a consulting company he hired? LOL...yeah, I mean that's great proof. Even so, I even took the time to read that linked article and I must say it was an impressive amount of buzzwords that collectively said nothing. I particularly like this quote: "Having cross-functional teams from engineering, design, purchasing and more, has been a breakthrough, because they gain empathy and respect for each other’s practices and work together, rather than sitting in silos that tend to block each other’s effort." I hate to break this to you but that was not something new at Ford. Every week at Ford for 10+ years (pre-Hackett) I sat in numerous cross functional meetings to do exactly what that article states. This article, from an independent source, is a more accurate portrayal of Hackett at Ford: https://www.forbes.com/sites/georgebradt/2020/08/04/what-you-must-learn-from-jim-hacketts-failure-as-fords-ceo/?sh=331058c843b8 (NOTE: I am not commenting on Hackett as a person or his business dealings at any other company. I have no working knowledge of whether he was any good or not at the other places. I do know, though, that he was a miserable failure at Ford.)

"a direct result of Jim Hackett's design thinking taking root at Ford Motor Company." Seriously? You give this guy WAY too much credit. First of all, the CEO has literally ZERO impact on interior design. I've been in countless product design meetings in my life and CEO's just do not get into that level of detail. Secondly, Hackett was actually anti-Maverick and Bronco Sport from the beginning. Those products were done with his reluctant support - he was not a fan of entry level segments. (Slimmer margins - he wanted the R&D spent elsewhere but .) Jim Baumbick was really the driving force behind the Maverick. From what I'm told, Baumbick and Hackett were quite at odds with it. Hackett wanted costs taken out of the program in order for it to proceed and Baumbick basically had to tell him he needed to be empowered to make decisions without management interference to get things done as quick as Hackett wanted. This led to Hackett never being involved....no decision on that program went any further than Hau Thai-Tang. Sorry for the Hackett rant but that guy was not qualified to run an automotive company and everyone I know at Ford was glad when he left. (Including one of his direct reports who I am very close with.)

LOL.....can't spell unwarranted without a U, A & W.

Seats were one of those components that Ford used to buy as complete units from suppliers but my F-150 program was the first to launch the new F-Family seats where we started to do more of them in-house. (We would buy the frame in small , medium or large from the seat supplier then do the rest of it in-house.) But that was 15 years ago and don't really know if they truly rolled that out to all the other models or just gave up and started buying complete seats again. As far as Chicago is concerned, that would probably be one of the plants that needed to do more of that kind of thing given the plant was old and small. That plant was considered our worst assembly plant for a number of reasons and if there were to be closures the 3 always on the top of the list were Chicago, Flat Rock and Oakville. (Again, that hit list may look different now....not trying to freak anyone out. LOL...)

GM and Ford has done that a little bit here and there but mainly out of necessity due to the plants they have not being able to do certain things. I'm not as familiar with Stellantis. On the Ford and GM side, my understanding is their total 3rd Party labor pool is estimated to be a small fraction (say no more than 10%) of what the transplants use. Attached is an interesting photo. I had to do this on F-150 when we were setting some things up for Dearborn. Note Ford's KC plant how there is just the plant in that area. (The two buildings just south of Mill Creek are Ford's paint and body buildings so everything shown is Ford-owned.) Contrast that to the Tundra plant. Look at how many other buildings there are. Toyota has the big plant in the middle but everything else is a 3rd party subassembler. (~ 20 in total.) Even with their main plant, my recollection was half of that left section was leased-out to subassemblers, too.

Roughly speaking, the actual hourly wages are ~ 10% less for transplants and their benefits are 30% worse so that makes the overall compensation for transplants about 20% less overall. HOWEVER, and this is a big one that nobody talks about, the transplant plants also use WAY more 3rd party sub-assembly labor, too, which helps reduce the overall labor cost even further vs UAW plants. (In addition to fudging the domestic content percentages for foreign automakers.) For instance, GM Arlington has ~ 5,700 workers there (~5,400 are UAW) while Toyota San Antonio only has ~ 3,000 hourly workers. There are probably 1,000 to 2,000 hourly folks working for sub assemblers in San Antonio and these positions are usually paid 10-25% less than the Toyota non-union workers. So do the math on that. (UAW costs vs the average costs of the Toyota/3rd Party workers.) Avanzar is one of those 3rd party companies I am referring to. They make seats, door panels and other parts "across the street" and ship them over to the main Toyota plant as a complete assembly. In GM's case, those parts are often put together by UAW workers inside the GM plant. (Same with most of the Ford plants, too.)

Yet a few hundred miles away in San Antonio, lower paid non-union Toyota workers are happily putting together as many Tundra's as they can. This is just ridiculous......

I agree, but that's just not Ford's style. He keeps these things to himself and doesn't let the PR folks talk about this stuff. Doesn't want to seem like he's bragging I guess. When I was on the F-150, we wanted to run commercials that showed tests of our (fully boxed) frame versus the swiss cheese wimpy frames on the Tunda/Titan but nope....can't talk bad about competitors in commercials. Look at the whole Detroit Central Station project. Do people really think they couldn't get cheaper office space elsewhere as opposed to throwing a ridiculous amount of money at that building? Of course not....they are spending a ton of money to do what he thinks is right for the city of Detroit. When it comes to making money, Bill Ford is not the best leader. He's too nice. Some real hard decisions will have to be made at Ford some day (or should have been made already) but he's not going to be the one that makes them or allows certain things to happen.

Now that's where you and I disagree. Why do UAW members feel they are entitled to earn more money than the same jobs at Ford's competitors? Fain & Co accuse Ford Management of greed but that goes both ways. In this country, we have two groups of plant workers in this industry. (Non-union and union.) One of them, who gets paid 10-30% less depending on the metric is currently happy and working and the group that is paid the highest is the one striking. I can't seem to comprehend that. The fact of the matter is, that going back years those jobs were WAY overpaid and that's why some other wages have outpaced the UAW factory worker wages. Just because Ford and GM paid uncompetitive wages before doesn't mean they should keep doing it. That's one of the things that helped Honda, Toyota, Kia, etc gain footholds in this country to begin with. They had extra money to actually spend on the cars...... If you have 2 pizza companies, and both sell the Pizza for $15: Company A spends $10 on ingredients and $5 on everything else (stores, employees, etc) vs Company B spends $7 on ingredients and $8 on everything else Who do you think is going to make the better Pizza?

I'd like to see the Ford Probe re-imagined as a Model 3 fighter. It's got the right shape, just make it a sporty 4-door sedan. (NOT intended to replace the Mustang! LOL...) I kinda like the first-gen design for this the best but either would work. Even the "no-grille" front-end is perfect for EV's. I'd even bring back the pop-up headlights.

This is so off-base...... For the record, the ONLY reason the F-150 is even built at the Rouge is because of Bill Ford. I was one of the managers of that '09-14 F-150 program and when that program started we closed Norfolk and were looking for another place to build it. Tere were other lower-cost options - including some non-UAW facilities. (Namely Mexico.) Bill Ford said no way. They decided to pay a lot more money to make it work in Dearborn. I keep thinking of those moments during this strike and part of me wishes they'd shut them all down and go non-union across the board. Would be better for the company in the long run. There have also been proposals over the years to even relocate the HQ out of the country. (Like Eaton when they "moved" to Ireland.) But again, the Ford's won't let it happen even though they know it would be better financially in the long run.

This cost of living arguement doesn't apply in a lot of cases. BMW's plant is in Greenville/Spartanburg SC which is one of the fastest growing areas in the country and is a heck of a lot nicer to live (and more expensive) than places like Flat Rock, Wayne, Woodhaven, Lima, Avon Lake OH, etc. Not every non-union plant is in the middle of nowhere.

Note the numerous power outlets on those pics I just posted on each side of the radio. (Both 12V and USB.) Your rental not having it is more about the person who spec'd it rather than the truck not complying with your wishes.

My only gripes about the M2 refresh is I wish they went a little further on the exterior changes and the interior trim panels are HARD plastic. I mean HARD. (Specifically door trims and the dash.) Supposedly this is due their new heftier, more durable materials which I will admit you can feel when the panels are removed and set next to the old M2's trim pieces. I do feel like there was a way to make them a little softer to the touch though, but I'm picky about that. As far as the price, yeah, a fair amount higher than the Ford we've covered all the reasons why. Here are some real pics of the new interior....

They won't officially give B50 #'s anymore, but I'd say 250-300K miles is a safe assumption. It does vary quite a bit by duty cycle, though. The FTL/PACCAR trucks will no doubt be higher priced than the F650/750 but to many that won't matter. Owning a Ford is a completely different experience than the others, and many are perfectly willing to pay more for nicer trucks and better parts & service support.

Freightliner and PACCAR will be offering the new Cummins Gas B6.7/7.2 variant starting in 25CY - with Allison transmissions - so I'd be really nervous about that if I was Ford. Ford had the luxury of being the only game in town when it came to Class 6-7 gas motors but now others are joining the party, with a more sought after transmission, too. The Cummins B6.7/7.2 will go up to 300-350HP / 660 torque which is plenty for that class. Cummins even claims the gas variant will have the same B50 life as the diesel. If true that is pretty groundbreaking, but that certainly defies conventional logic regarding engine life ratings between gas and diesel.

From my counterpart who handles our Ford stores, they haven't heard any info on 25MY at this point, either. Per usual, they are very frustrated and thinks Ford is asleep at the wheel when it comes to OEM-to-Dealer/Customer communication. A lot of our loyal Ford customers are switching over to Freightliner...... Everyone I know (on the dealer side and inside the company) are tired of Farley and how the company is handling things these days.