Chrisgb

13 jobs spanning 52 years and 4 career changes (not including military service), here. "What a long strange trip it's been," indeed! The lesson for me was, don't trade personal freedom for cradle-to-grave security. My first full time job taught me that. I worked as a Teamster on a vacuum cleaner assembly line, making nearly what Ford TCAP line people were making, after 6 months. After that, just a matter of gaining seniority for more vacation & bumping rights. Personally, I never understood the practice of calling the employer "Unfair." I agreed to do the work under the physical and financial provisions of the agreement in place. The next 40-ish years didn't look promising to me, but i got the blue collar complacency and stayed until the company left 17 years later. The security blanket was ripped off and I was out in the cold. I stumbled around selling life insurance, doing various other unskilled jobs, and later selling cars. A bankruptcy and a separation, later, I went to truck driving school and "paid my dues" working my way through successive employers, proving my worth and overcoming the challenges along the way. I was accepted at a Hazardous Material Special Waste Hauler company earning the industry's top wages (More miles, more smiles).Today we live quite comfortably, having landed in retirement on our feet. I believe that our three children learned a lot from watching our struggles and how we worked through them. All are now employed in rewarding careers all have changed jobs and sought more training or education a few times, including my Union son, who risked leaving an assembly line job and started apprenticeship machinist training. 4 years of school, working third shift with two kids, and now a journeyman experimental engineering machinist, nearly doubling his income within the same company.

I think they need to put one on the interior surface , too. Imagine how awkward it will be, reaching across that 5 acre dashboard to clean the bottom the windshield !

Maybe what we see is some sort of camouflage , like how they put a fake cap on a test pickup and the real Cad is lurking under that. I can't believe some styling team spent hours and hours working on a clay model of this. They should have bought the rights to the 2011 Citroen Metropolis concept

@Champs, I think the economy has always responded to evolving technology. Today's auto technicians will be tomorrow's battery cell replacement techs, the oil change kid will become the software flasher, or move on to a job where he/she says, "For here or to go?" a lot. Very few ferriers and lamplighters on unemployment now. Milkmen, TV repairmen, locomotive firemen, all have moved on to something else within my lifetime. I'm more of a hydrogen fuel cell booster myself. I don't think the EV age will last more than a generation or so. Many of the resources are finite, energy intensive to process, and politically dicey.

Sounds like a garage band.

I'm in door #1. The wow factor for me was back in the fall of 1964. I turned 15, at the time it was the Right Of Passage age in MN when you could get a learner's permit. Beatlemania was in full swing and the wizards at the Ford Motor Company had morphed a stupid (US) Falcon, into a sexy, affordable car that was conceivable, if not practical, to buy I while living with my parents and working part time at a gas station for $1.56/hr. So the original concept (stigma?) of a church lady's sedan turned into an insurable sporty car is what still stays with me. The D for me is akin to the Ford GT; not really built by Ford, fun to look at other people's, and likely to spend most of iit's life in a climate controlled garage.

Is this "Front Mid-Engine," like the RX-7 &-8?

It's for those to whom size matters and/or can't afford a Celestiq.

Unfortunately, with the mega publicly traded dealer groups in NA, getting dozens or hundreds of rooftops prioritized to order-outs would be Herculean. While the floorplan assistance and factory rebate money could be applied as deep discounts on Dlr Group A's orders, Dlr Group B's store across the street is rolling spot D's. I think more money is lost by having the wrong configuration of models in inventory; to wit the Mach-e's on the ground unsold and floorpan meter running. It would have to start at the factory level to be done, IMO. Reduce or eliminate floor plan assistance, offer bigger rebates & Factory to Dlr incentives on customer orders vs stock orders. If nobody has acres of inventory, everybody would order out. You'd still need fleet sales to balance run rates, but in the end I believe it would be a win-win all around; consumer, dealer and factory.

If I understand correctly, the Titan was similar in construction to the Chevy Avalanche or Explorer Sport Trac: a beefed up Armada base, and not the other way around. Limited payload and towing compared to the Big Three. Also, I think the "No-resemblance-to-F-150" styling was a turnoff.

It's hard to reshape the standard model: large inventory, floorplan financing, spot delivery. The ideal of increased customer orders, reduced floorpan, and covering more of the asphalt with profitable used inventory seems to have faded.

The problem with 100% ethanol is that is still a carbon based fuel: C2 H6O, where C2 is 2 atoms of carbon, H6 is 6 atoms of hydrogen and one atom of Oxygen. It has much less carbon than gasoline stock: C8 H18. But ethanol has a lower energy density, so you need to burn more of it to do the same work. So more raw material (corn) is needed, more jungle has to be cleared for cornfields, which absorbs less carbon that the jungle it replaced, and the net result is still carbon being released into the atmosphere, and less being absorbed.

Concerning the electrical grid's ability to support charging, as BEVs become commonplace, there should be a measurable if not significant reduction in power needed to refine petroleum. Below is the onsite electrical distribution grid of Flint Hills Pine bend refinery, which is supplied by Xcel Energy. FH has begun constructing a 45 MW solar farm on site, which will allow XL to divert 3200 home's worth of electricity to other parts of their grid. FH will still need to rely on the grid, but much less so. So two factors are at work: less refining going on, and less reliance on the overall grid and the third of two factors; FH is investing an awful lot of money into this, they must envision oil products being viable for several decades I believe more large industrial complexes will build their own renewable energy systems to augment that which they get from the grid. https://www.hometownsource.com/sun_thisweek/community/dakota_county/flint-hills-resources-advances-large-solar-energy-project/article_aba4433e-95a0-11ec-ab36-d760d3da104c.html Flint Hills Pine Bend Refinery. The two highlighted areas are the power distribution & transforming plants. One of scores of refineries in the US that represent a huge reliance on the overall grid:

I am surprised at how far down Texas is. I would bet that North Dakota is in the top 3 for number of utility and cargo trailers. If you see a pickup that's not pulling something, it looks like something's missing.

That’s not what it says, although you are probably right. He/She likely didn’t use actual stat-by-state registration data to make the graphic. My response to your response to @rmc523 was deliberately preposterous. ?

No top selling PU's in CT or NJ means that all OEMs sold exactly the same number each, therefore there couldn't be a top seller that month

Nissan Frontier sales aren't shown- June: 5,812, YTD:34,139 Honda Ridgeline also outsold Ranger In June: 4,678 and YTD: 27,430 Yeah, yeah the Ridgeline isn't really a truck; all the more embarrassing. Ranger did trounce the GMC Canyon by nearly double though. "Lead follow or get out of the way!" -former Ford exec.

I hope Ford will find a way to dramatically increase Ranger production.They have been a great truck and with enough numbers, would stand up to Tacoma. I've read the comments on BOF over the years, that one of the main reasons Ford shipped the tooling here from OZ was ultimately for the Bronco, and Ranger is just a placeholder; build a few now and then. The all-new 2024 Tacoma could slow Ranger enough that It would become untenable to continue with it. I wonder if that is not the plan anyway - roll over on the runt of the litter and raise the other pup (Bronco). For 2024, Ranger model and option package strategy has gotten more bizarre, and they dropped the SuperCab/6ft box, (Coloranyon did, too) while Tacoma offers that and a crew cab/ 6ft box option on the SR 5. Complicated, A lot of changes and money spent to on a model that's been selling well under 100k/yr for four out of the five years it's been back. Toyota is planning a Maverick competitor based on their TNGA platform which underpins the Rav4 and Camry. Maverick is poaching a lot of sales from Toyota and others. Dealers have reported a lot of Rav 4 trade-ins for Mavericks, and Toyota won't sit still and watch customers leave the fold.

That sounds extraordinarily optimistic to me. Ford would need to climb a very steep ramp, indeed. Looking at the production by plant to date, there have been 46,228 Mach-e’s and 8757 Lightnings produced, and 2019 e-Transits, with about half of the total sold.To reach 600k BEVs they need to build about 545,000 more before New Year's Day, or about 90,800 units per month from those three plants. Maximum monthly production at Dearborn Truck so far has been 34,230 units in May and for Cuautitlan 13,369 Mach-e’s. Even if Dearborn went to 100% lightning production and Cuautitlan and KCAP doubled production, Ford would still be quite short of 600k for the year. I am not aware of any all new BEV’s coming online this year, and this is a contract year. I am sure production will increase for both lines, and would be happy to see a 50% increase in overall BEV sales YOY, but 600k ain’t gonna happen until Blue Oval City is fully operational, IMO.

It depends. According to a report by the EU Parliament, the differences seem to be more to do with how vehicles are tested, and the loopholes in current EU regulations, than the hardware itself. https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/ATAG/2017/595363/IPOL_ATA(2017)595363_EN.pdf

Inherent smoothness (no rocking couple), less block material, easier to produce; one head, one exhaust manifold, one intake manifold, only need two cams instead of four for DOHC. I get that there are parts that are twice as long than those in a V6, but overall simpler to produce. Sound better than a V6 or especially an inline four!

Nice look slightly lowered. The body lines carry it well.

Developing countries can avoid building coal fired boilers and oil heat. In agriculture, no-till or reduced tillage, and cover cropping reduce soil erosion as do hedgerows and river bank buffers. Combined with better breeding, animal feed, confinement practices and other farm management procedures have reduced dairy's carbon footprint by 63% over the last 40 years the US. Producing a gallon of milk in the US has 19% less greenhouse gas emissions than did in 2007. Some of the methods and technologies are beyond what the least developed nations can ramp up, but they don't have to be stuck in the 20th century.

I somewhat agree about the GM trucks, but they are sold under separate channels, which is good for F-Series marketing. There have been few calendar or model years that Ford made more light trucks than GM. I thought at the time of the 2009 bailout, that GM should drop the Chevrolet name from the Silverado and market all trucks as GMCs, along with going back to the C/K nomenclature and use the Silverado & Sierra names as models again (shoulda kept Saturn and dropped Buick in NA, too). The current styling differences could have been for separate trims. The 2024 Ranger will debut as a SuperCrew w/5ft bed only, just like the 2024 ok; "Canyorados." Maybe rolling out only one configuration for now is tied to the overall push for better quality on Ford's part. I Hope so. Unknown if either Ford or GM will bring back/offer SuperCabs or CrewCabs w/5- or 6ft box, as Tacoma and Frontier offer them for 2024.