Ford spends more on R&D than any other company in the world

[marc-o]

If you listen real closely, you can actually hear Honda tell Detroit how they're going to beat the pants off of them in 3 years. Its like a football team announcing which play they are getting ready to run to the other team. Several months ago, there was an article in one of the automotive industry magazines talking about Honda's next generation hybrids being something like half as costly to build as their current ones. Now, it sounds as if they are leveraging their powertrain expertise to bring high efficiency diesels to the North American car market. I can't wait to hear Ford and GM excuses in a few years when Honda (and Toyota, which is also working on 2nd generation hybrids that are much less costly to manufacture) are once again in the right place at the right time with the right products while Detroit fiddles.

 

Here's the bottomline as I see it:

 

Honda has a pretty long history of delivering technological breakthroughs that work for the mass market in emissions and engine technology. They were the first to bring hybrids to NA (outside Japan), and even though it was small and didnt sell well, they did it.

 

Billy promised us profitability in '06 and something about 250k hybrids in the near future. Both of which are examples in a string of promises not kept.

 

If Ford has somekind of groundbreaking annoucement about its diesels, this is the time!!! However my thoughts are at this point there's a more urgent fire to douse.

 

Ford clearly isn't getting good return on their R&D spending, for whatever reason. Whether it's investing in the wrong things, not bringing projects to market, or plain excess fat, that money isn't reflected in high-tech vehicles. There's nothing wrong with lower-tech vehicles, if that's the case don't burn money on R&D.

[RichardJensen]

Ford clearly isn't getting good return on their R&D spending, for whatever reason. Whether it's investing in the wrong things, not bringing projects to market, or plain excess fat, that money isn't reflected in high-tech vehicles. There's nothing wrong with lower-tech vehicles, if that's the case don't burn money on R&D.

http://www.ford.com/en/goodWorks/environme...ricModeling.htm

 

This kind of research, obviously, has no short term financial benefits.

 

Still, as a fan of the old-school corporate approach to pure research that underpinned Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, and which is still found at IBM, I would have a hard time seeing Ford put a stop to this kind of stuff, just because it doesn't yield short term benefits.

 

That said, Ford definitely needs to get better about how it directs money spent on new products, so that Ford consistently introduces products that resonate well with consumers.

Edited October 7, 2006 by RichardJensen