They appear to be doing that with ce1 and presumably the new ICE truck and other new products.   My point was they had no new products in the pipeline outside of the EVs that were cancelled. 

5.0 V8 Bronco would be badass. Averaging 10 or 11 MPG would be less fun for your wallet. 😂    

I’m talking about the in-built costs with C1-C2 suppliers, not just cheapening down the price of parts - it’s all about the costs attached to outsourcing the various software controlled modules and how Ford is now prisoner to suppliers controlling software changes and costs of each subassembly. That is where a lot of money goes out the door and why commodity vehicles have become a dirty word for Ford but not necessarily so for other manufacturers.   CE1 made huge changes in both software control and how the modules connect to a CPU that drives most functions. I’m hoping that Ford applies some or all of the changes made to reduce outgoings.

But the 2020 Escape did fix the manufacturing costs-look at the reviews of how the interior changed and how reviewers thought it was "cheap" vs the previous gen, but yet it had same or better materials in it vs the Bronco Sport or Maverick. Yet again-personal experience-the 2020 Escape and 2025 Bronco Sport are almost identical to one another outside of some shape changes in the dash area and button/screen placement to make them look different, but stupid little details are in identical places like the little pockets on the inside of the front seats and other pockets on the lower console.    The previous gen Escape was a complete fucking mess pricing wise-I've seen this personally-when a 4 year newer SE has more standard options in it vs a 2013 Titanium model and costs 5K less, you know you have issues on your hands. Then all the decontenting that happened at the end of that gen with cheaper tail lights and cutting back on fog lights, if I remember correctly. 

I wouldn't be concerned at all, the GTD is more or less a Ford GT "replacement" in the lineup   You can still get other models for a far more reasonable price.   The Corvette and its offshoots are bespoke products that are requiring what I'd assume millions of dollars in R&D for an engine that isn't shared with anything else (to best of my knowledge-not sure if they share anything with other GM V8s) for more or less what is a vanity product. I'm not sure what GM approach is here outside of saying hey we can do this but we aren't making money on it.    Ford is basically factory modifying a 60K car with an uprated truck engine and is able sell it for $300K. I think its detractors don't like the supposed lack of snob appeal that it might not have. 

Not the same thing, it bombed with buyer because the major styling change was a problem The other major change was a weight reduction close to 200 lbs.   What I’m talking about is getting away from a simple evolutionary model change to something that significantly lowers design and manufacturing costs which did not happen with the 2020 Escape.

The updated Escape was the first of the three of them to be launched. the 2020 was a major change from the 2019.  

IonBoost RangeBoost MagnaBoost InductionBoost

I wonder if humanoids will change the UAW's (confrontational) bargaining stance during the next contract talks.  Looks like OEM's now have an option they didn't have before.

Yea, the humanoids from Boston Dynamics and others are among the technologies that can bring about a big resurgence of manufacturing productivity in the U.S., reversing stagnation and decline over the past decade or so:   The labor productivity of American manufacturing has declined in the past decade. American workers needed 106 hours of work in 2023 to produce what needed only 100 hours in 2013. The good news, though, is that the game of leapfrog calls for the jumped-over player to then do the jumping. And the oncoming wave of AI-enabled manufacturing technologies are well suited to U.S. advantages.   While industrial robots have been around for a long time, engineers had to program those machines for each task they might handle—and, crucially, re-program them when a task changed even slightly. Such brittleness is exactly what contemporary approaches to AI stand to fix.   In theory, then, general-purpose robots could potentially adapt to any environment without having to be explicitly programmed to do so, communicating about needed adaptations in human language. They could handle subtle changes in their environment (“the boxes are usually in one part of the factory, but today, they’re somewhere else”) in the same fluid way that a human worker does.