iamweasel

"Splitting" Model-E is nothing more than smoke and mirrors. Every vehicle line is a separate business unit and has their own P&L - they just never reported it that way. (It was reported in groups like "car" and "truck.") So you can pick and choose what vehicles are in each grouping fairly easily. So this whole "separate" battery electric division is nothing more than "selling it" to Wall Street. It's just a game played to satisfy investors who don't understand the business. That doesn't mean I think this is bad in any way - it's pretty meaningless in the grand scheme of things and doesn't really help or hurt the real product.

Now I didn't address whether meaningful change is occurring right now or not. That is still possible, as there have been some things in the works but I'd classify them as minor changes. We'll see what else gets done in the coming months..... I'd still argue that changing policies is not the biggest issue. In fact, some stability and simply sticking to whatever policies are currently in-place is probably a more effective route IMO. As one of the previous posters mentioned, stop moving the goalposts all the time!

The problem is there is nowhere to go in many cases. There are only so many suppliers in the world, and many of them aren't open to taking on new clients. (Ever heard of Keiretsu? It's still alive and well in many cases.) When I was on F-150, we were mandated to change our offshore sourcing from 2% to 10% for my program. That meant we had to fire North American suppliers and get a replacement from Asia. OH-MY-GOD that was painful as hell and a miserable experience. I still can't walk by an 2009-2014 F-150 and stop myself from swearing at the antenna because re-sourcing that was one of the most miserable experiences I had. Cannot count how many hours I spent on that for a freaking $10 part. What happened was the A/B-Tier suppliers refused to do business with us, so we ended up dealing with C/D-Tier suppliers (think startups) to satisfy our offshore sourcing requirement. We did save a few bucks, but I know the quality was worse - no doubt about it.

So much mis-information in this post. Wow...... Again, as I said in my prior post, bean counters do not force cost reductions on anything. The Chief Engineer/Program Manager are in charge of that. Just because the bean counters give them the reports showing how far over cost they are doesn't mean they are telling engineers to shave dollars off their parts. For starters, they don't know enough about vehicle mechanics/engineering to have those conversations. Oh, and bean counters don't get bonuses like that, either. (Before I was a Program Manager I was a bean counter - so I know how it goes.) Product level bean counters don't really get involved in plant assembly. That's an entirely different crew and ergonomic engineers drive the bus on all of that. As far as the door keypad/rear tailgate stuff, again not a bean counter decision but if Marketing says those are things that will not incur any additional revenue or the incremental revenue is below cost then why do it? Think about it for a second - is the keypad on the door nice? Of course....I love it. But would I buy a Ford over something else because of it? No. I do agree with you on the mass exodus from engineering. That's been a longtime problem. Those jobs are rough......they are less designers (which is what they want to be) and more paperwork pushers, and they have to deal with suppliers all the time which sucks.

Those 3 things are not the biggest problem when it comes to vehicle quality. The #1 issue, by far, is supplier component quality. This is partly why the supplier relations with the "Big 3" have been so controversial over the years. In a nutshell, Ford would pay 10-20% more for their components versus what the Asian brands pay, and those components were lesser quality, too. Uh-oh..... To address your concerns: 1) Bean counters NEVER push for lower cost suppliers. NEVER. That's not how it works. (Speaking as a former Ford Product Development Program Manager for the F-150.) Those bean counters simply rack-up the data on where the cost of the vehicle stands compared to the budget given by the Board of Directors/Upper Management. (Marketing management provides revenue assumptions.) At that point, if the cost/revenue balance is not where it needs to be then the Chief Engineer/Program Manager decide together where costs need to be trimmed, and the finance folks help with that given they control the cost data for every part on the vehicle. 2) There are some issues in Ford engineering. Main issue is we had a product development playbook - FOLLOW IT. Do not let half the team move on past a checkpoint if the other half hasn't finished yet. That was the biggest issue I saw in my 15 years at the company. Then you have all these different groups (chassis vs powertrain vs electrical, etc) doing different things at different times for the same truck and things get off-kilter, teams waste time working on old, or duplicate, assumptions, etc. Left foot and right foot must work together here. The other "issue" with engineering is packaging. Sometimes the way the pieces fit together just doesn't work as intended. (Maybe a harness rubs against something when we thought there was enough space there.) 3) Production issues rarely matter when it comes to long term durability. Plants are so dummy-proofed these days. Generally speaking warranty repairs under 90-days are scrutinized to see what went wrong, and some are plant-related issues and some aren't. Only about 25% of these issues is due to something done wrong during final assembly. After 90-days, a high majority of those warranty claims are due to component failure of some sort - not due to how an operator at the plant put it on.

Ironically, enough, we got my wife a Bronco Sport Badlands in January and the 2.0L/8-speed combo is awesome. The trans shifts great no matter how you drive it. I like driving in Sport Mode which turns off the auto start/stop, and it's very quick off the line and when passing. It probably feels faster than it really is, which is not a bad thing.

Interesting info..... Ironically I just got a recall notice this week for my Fusion's shifter cable. I haven't had an issue with mine yet, though. I have 2 vehicles, my company car is a 2013 Fusion that I've had since Oct 2012. Mine was one of the very first of the new bodystyle. It's a Titanium FWD and now has 120K miles on it. The car has been wonderful. I've had ONE issue, when a check engine light came on one day, but the car drove fine with the light on. Took it to the Ford dealer the next day and one $250 sensor later it was done. This happened about a year or two ago ~ 90K miles. That has been my only repair. I never had to get anything fixed under warranty, either, aside from a recall or two. I do agree on the transmission - seems this engine needs an 8-speed badly. With my 6-speed, it does lurch from 1st to 2nd and 2nd to 3rd sometimes during medium throttle. If I'm easy with it or floor it then it seems fine and shifts smoothly. MPG's for me are around 22-24 city and 31-33 highway. I'd say that's ok at best, but my other car certainly is more efficient given it has a 420HP twin-turbo V6 with an 8-speed tranny and gets about the same fuel mileage. (22-23 city / 30-31 hwy on that car.) If I had to be nitpicky and complain about some things: My driver armrest now has a 1-inch tear in the vinyl, there are some flakes in the inside pockets of my wheels, and I cannot stand the plastic chrome exhaust tip covers. They look good, but are too tightly wrapped / too far away from the main exhaust pipes so black soot gets all over them. I am constantly cleaning them. I feel like the pipes should have extended further into the chrome surrounds to help the soot exit without grabbing onto the plastic tips.

That's not really true, in reality. A majority of these "problems" are things people complain about but aren't necessarily things that require trips to the dealer. For instance, many of the "problems" are infotainment related and because some old geezer can't figure out how to pair the bluetooth, they mark it as a "problem" on the survey. JD Power is a very reputable firm and does a much better job with these quality surveys than Consumer Reports who are frauds, but all of these studies need to be taken with a grain of salt. The sample sizes on these surveys are so small that's why you get a lot of variability from year to year as well. I spent several years of my Ford Motor Co life in Product Development and also Marketing Analytics where we went over these surveys with a fine tooth comb. Needless to say the info was interesting, but it was more of a customer satisfaction survey as opposed to really telling us what was a real defect. These surveys on our own vehicles also had no correlation to warranty repairs, either.

Which SD are you referring to? 114SD or 122SD? (Which are completely different cabs.) This will clear itself up in the next few months as the 122SD will be discontinued at the end of this year. The X-Series (47X/49X) will now be the flagship "Premium Vocational" truck for DTNA. The 114SD will still be available but the cab is different than the X-series. The 114SD is the "Budget Vocational" model - The 47X cab is much nicer and stronger. The other differences are: - Engines: The 114SD can only get L9/X12/DD13 engines just like the 47X. If you want bigger power (DD15/DD16/X15) then you need to buy a 49X. Without the 122SD, there will be no Freightliner equivalent to the 49X. - Configurations: Relative to the 114SD/47X, there will be far more options available on the 47X such as twin steers and other specialized options. Lastly, as far as Western Stars winning bids, they will never be lower priced than Freightliner. The only time Western Star typically gets bid wins is when there is no Freightliner dealer submitting a bid and/or the bid gets written specifically for Western Star which is pretty easy to do. (One way to rig it is to put in the bid docs "must have a BBC at 112-inches or less and must have a Detroit engine." That eliminates everyone but Western Star.)

The AALA data is garbage because of a massive loophole in how subassemblies are treated. Some of you may remember discussing this last year. That makes the entire report junk - simply a way to throw something out there to get your company's name out there. Thanks, Cars.com for the worthless report.... To summarize what I mean, if a company brings in 50 parts from China to build something like a seat, and they have that seat assembled together at a supplier's location or offside subassembly park, that complete seat assembly will count as 100% domestic content even though all the parts are Chinese. (Simply because those Chinese parts were assembled together on domestic soil BEFORE going into the assembly plant.) If those same parts were shipped directly into the final assembly plant and put-together there, the entire value of that component would be foreign. So due to that, the AALA data is complete and utter garbage. The #'s can be manipulated big-time, and the asian brands in particular have been experts at doing this by using ventures like this: Avanzar Interior Technologies — San Antonio | Adient "The Company came about in anticipation of the economic growth opportunities of auto manufacturers purchasing complete assemblies rather than components."

4700, 4900 and 5700 are dead. They will not be produced after this year. The WST X-Series is not the same cab as the FTL. Does it look the same and have the same dimensions......yep....but they are constructed differently. (More steel reinforcement in the WST cabs.) This is a fantastic truck.....still strong enough to do whatever but fixed all the issues with the old WST cab.

So I was curious about this and reached out to a couple of my friends still at the company, one who actually works in the design studio. The short answer is Hackett was not very involved in anything with interior design. He was not a car guy and could not really speak the language if you know what I mean. They rarely even saw him in the studio or anywhere in the Product Development buildings for that matter. That does not really surprise me because historically the CEO's have never gotten too big into design details. That's what the Design and Engineering managers are for and there are plenty of them as it is. If the CEO had to be hands on with design that just meant the Design and Engineering managers were not good at their jobs.

Yeah, having an engine there helps that situation, but that's just one part. (Albeit a big one.) It's all the other parts that nickel and dime you to death. There are thousands of parts to account for and most still come out of the midwest.

I'm not buying the theory that moving production to Mexico will help make a vehicle line profitable. In fact, I'm on the opposite side of that fence - moving to Mexico actually makes it more expensive in many cases. Why? The silent killer known as freight. (Inbound and outbound.) When I was on F-150 my group did the financial analysis on closing Norfolk and figuring out where to move that production. (Mexico or Dearborn. Obviously the latter won - not just because of $$, though.) While we would have saved $500 per truck on assembly by moving it to Mexico, which is BIG dollars when multiplied by 550,000/units per year, most of the supply base was in the midwest so the inbound freight costs from there to Mexico far outweighed the costs of sending those parts to Dearborn. Of course outbound freight for the trucks went up, too, so that $500 savings evaporated quickly, and then some. Problem is, for some reason, outbound freight costs were always "below the (gross) line" and many execs made decisions without paying attention to those freight costs. (That's what you get from execs who came up in Engineering or Marketing, with no Finance background.) In addition, when doing comparisons they would not assume the correct piece costs on the parts - they would think a widget costs $25 per truck regardless, where in reality that part would raise to $28-30 if you moved it to Mexico due to the additional inbound freight being added-in. All the other Ford plants there were set up as export bases, not put there because of cost savings, per se. If you export from Mexico to South America, for instance, the taxes/tariff's were a lot less than exporting from the US. Lastly, from what I hear from the Daimler folks I work with, the 2 plants there did not yield the expected savings there and has brought numerous headaches that go with cross-border production. Almost all of those Mexico-built Freightliner's are coming back to the US - not being exported anywhere.

I cannot speak how the innerworkings on the Accounting side are now, but when I was there every vehicle line had their own P&L - it just wasn't reported that way publicly. Each vehicle line was consolidated together and reported as a group, sometimes split into car & truck groups for instance. One reason for this is to hide low performers in a given group. (We DID NOT want to show F650/750 separately that's for sure....) So splitting EV's into a separate group is no big deal, no different than how sometimes Ford will report "SUV's" as a group on certain things.

I'm not real sure about that, honestly. All I can say, from my time there and being in a few meetings with him, when it came to the proposal to shut down F650/750 when we knew Blue Diamond had to end he was mostly concerned about cutting jobs/departments, how it would be received in the press/public, etc. It wasn't as much about the dollars and cents. Bill was a super-nice guy (and still is by all accounts)....but too nice to run that company, honestly. He would not make some of the tough decisions that needed to be made, when they needed to be made. (Such as getting rid of Hackett....that guy was a train wreck from Day 1 and everyone knew it. But they were personal friends so that's why it took so long to get rid of him.)

Well let's not forget the new BEV Product Development chief Doug Field, the "outsider" from Tesla/Apple, is probably the key in all of that and he started his career at Ford. (6 years as an Engineer.) Tesla and Ford both had some really good habits and some bad ones. Time will tell if he picked up the good ones or bad ones from each. Ford's product development system/playbook is top-notch. The issue is staying on-script and that is determined by the PD leader. I remember going from Phil Martens (moron) to Derrick Kuzak (wonderful) and how much of an impact that had when I was there.

Honestly, this whole concept of "splitting in two" is just to appease wall street since so many investors wanted a spin-off. This is a compromise position making it seem like the BEV side will be on their own when in reality, behind the scenes, they aren't really doing anything that much different than before. (The EV's already had some separation, just like the F-series crew is separate from the Bronco folks.) It's like people think Ford goes out of their own way to purposefully create redundancy in the company. Trust me, that is far from the case.....where it makes sense they have people dedicated to specific things (engineering, where each vehicle line is relatively separate and/or paired with chassis-mates) and they also have generalists when needed (such as certain funcions in operations, finance, purchasing, etc.) As far as the F-650/750 go I am hearing there is a big divide in the company on what to do. Some want to disband the product altogether (not worth the headaches given the small volume and negative profit) and others want to use BEV to re-imagine the medium and possibly heavy truck side. Problem is, those in that latter category are not the high level people **BUT** the ground level support is what kept the F-650/750 alive after Blue Diamond. Many of the execs wanted to kill it back then, too, but ultimately let it continue for a number of reasons. In a couple months I go on an annual golfing weekend with my buddies in Michigan and 3 of them are fairly high level Ford guys who've been there over 20 years. (Friends from grad school and we all worked at Ford together until I left.) I always get caught up on the latest Ford gossip on that trip so I look forward to seeing what the latest hot topics are.

That International is pretty inefficient, actually. The Freightliner equivalent (eM2) has double the range of the International. Cost-wise, the chassis prices for the "e" trucks are expected to be about double of what a diesel chassis costs. Not sure on the medium duty trucks, but a sleeper Freightliner eCascadia weighs about 4,000lbs more than a conventional diesel truck and the government allows a 2,000lb weight exemption on the bridge chart gross, so your net payload loss is 2,000lbs.

Well that confirms my experience working in the industry - most people who are actually in charge of buying medium duty trucks don't really know what they are doing.

Certainly having an agreement with a customer, and then after-order going back for a price increase (when the actual dealer cost of that product is not changing), is not something dealers should be doing and I have no issue with Ford trying to eliminate that practice. That's why I tell everyone I know who is ordering a vehicle to get a signed buyers order with both signatures on it. (Customer and dealer.) I actually just had this happen to me last month. I ordered a Bronco Sport for my wife in August and then 2 weeks before it came in I was talking to the salesperson about something and he was like "oh, by the way...." (They tried to add $2K to my price - they didn't want to sell it to me at X-Plan anymore.) Ended up talking to the GM and told him I expect them to honor our signed buyers order, which he did.

I don't see anything wrong with dealers selling above MSRP if a customer is willing to pay it. How is this different than homes being sold above asking prices? It's supply and demand.....if the demand warrants it, no harm in dealers selling them for whatever someone will pay. If Ford wants to hold dealers down to MSRP in the good times, then Ford should reimburse dealers for selling anything short of MSRP in slower times. You can't have it both ways. Ford (and everyone else) has also been squeezing the delta between dealer cost and MSRP over the years, anyway, lowering the gross profit % on most vehicles along the way. And now, when dealer sales are going to be down 25% because the OEM's are struggling to produce vehicles, getting "extra" grosses on the cars you do get is the only way for a dealer to maintain the same level of profitability.

I think I mis-spoke. I was thinking class 6-7 as that is what I'm always looking at, as not many people really separate class 6 into it's own category because it doesn't really make sense to do so. Class 6-7 should always be reported together as they are basically the same trucks. In Class 6-7 combined, Freightliner has about 40% market share there. International is #2 then Ford.....

That's not true, Freightliner outsells Ford 2-to-1 in class 6. (Sometimes 3-to-1.) International also sells more than Ford and so do the PACCAR twins most times if you add them together. Ford is the only one of those offering a gas engine in class 6, too. When you pull those out of the mix, Ford really struggles to compete in class 6. In class 7, I don't believe that is dependent on class 8. It is far more connected to class 6, but to compete in class 7 you need the right cab, engine, transmission, numerous buildable combinations/options available, and a dealer network who can support those customers. Ford doesn't compete well in any of those things.

No, he wasn't a good businessman....not in the auto industry, anyway. He was in way over his head and out of his element. He was indecisive and failed to provide clear direction. It was obvious he was not right for the job very early on. I cannot comment on whether he was good or bad for Steelcase.