If you're looking for evidence that Ford has a future, consider the funky Flex.
The crossover utility vehicle with its eccentrically rectangular profile represents a design breakthrough for the Blue Oval on two fronts:
1. It bypasses the image problems of a minivan while providing similar degrees of utility;
2. It appeals to younger buyers looking for a way to stand out from the crowd.
After years of trying to challenge Chrysler's dominance in the minivan market, Ford finally threw in the towel in 2006, retiring the Freestar and taking a different path.
Using the Fairlane concept car that appeared at auto shows in 2005 as a starting point, Ford turned out the production version as the Flex for display at the 2007 New York International Auto Show. Sales of the 2009 model began last summer as the automotive market was disintegrating under the weight of recession.
In its second lap, the Flex is seeing respectable sales, with April establishing its best month since last summer's intro.
Critics have crowned the Flex with an array of kudos. Maxim Magazine named it the "Ultimate Road Car," while the Canadian and Texas auto writers associations named it crossover utility vehicle of the year.
The boxy design is more attractive in the long, full-size Flex than it is in the compact CUVs like the Nissan Cube. The body gains coolness with signature side grooves, all-black windows and a multi-panel Vista Roof.
With seating for seven, Flex provides wide, roomy seats and best-in-class head room and leg room in all three rows. Technical highlights include Ford Sync voice-activated navigation, a Sony premium audio system, Easy Fuel capless fuel filler, ambient lighting, a reverse camera system and Sirius Travel Link.
Priced in three trim levels from $29,325 to $37,585, the Flex is pricey enough that only those with secure jobs will probably be tempted. Flex is sold as a front-drive or all-wheel-drive vehicle.
Introduced with a 262-horsepower Duratec V6 engine, the Flex will be available with a much more powerful, 3.5-liter EcoBoost V6 in the 2010 model. The EcoBoost is the first gasoline direct-injection, twin-turbo in North America, cranking 355 horsepower and a hearty 350 foot-pounds of torque. Ford promises the power of a V8 with the fuel efficiency of a V6.
By 2013, more than 90 percent of Ford's North American lineup will be available with EcoBoost as part of the company's plans to improve fuel economy. Ford claims top fuel economy of 19 mpg combined city and highway in the full-size crossover category.
"The beauty of EcoBoost is that it enables us to downsize for fuel efficiency, yet boost for power," said Derrick Kuzak, Ford's group president of Global Product Development.. "We're able to decrease the size of the available engine -- such as installing a V6 versus a V8 -- yet boost the power using turbocharging to deliver similar power and torque of that larger engine."
The twin-turbocharged EcoBoost V6 also powers the Lincoln MKS and MKT.
The twin parallel turbochargers are water cooled and operate simultaneously. A high-pressure fuel pump operates up to 2,175 pounds per square inch, which is more than 35 times the norm seen in a conventional V6.
Flex's interior is designed to provide comfort and nice ambience for long-term travel, with a number of entertainment options.
Second-row passengers get adjustable and removable footrests, and both the second and third-row seats fold flat into the floor to create excellent cargo capacity.
An optional "mini-fridge" refrigerator can be mounted in the middle console mounted between the second-row seats.
Flex's voice-activated communications and entertainment system is called Ford Sync, integrating cell phone, satellite radio, compact disc, DVD and other systems under software from Microsoft. The Navigation system has a built in hard drive for music and picture storage. The cabin is lit with programmable "mood lighting" available in seven colors, along with a multi-panel Vista Roof, similar to that on the Edge.
An optional back-up camera above the bumper, allows the driver to see obstacles to the rear, displayed on the 8-inch navigation display screen, when reverse gear is engaged. The Flex comes with Ford's AdvanceTrac traction control system with roll stability control which helps the driver maintain control on low traction surfaces and during emergency maneuvers.
WHAT'S NEW: EcoBoost V6 in second year of production.
PLUSES: Styling, comfort, utility.
MINUSES: Price, maneuverability.
BOTTOM LINE: Stylish solution to minivan image problems.
(E-mail Richard Williamson at motorfriend(at)sbcglobal.net)
AUTOS TODAY
With sidebar: AUTOSSIDE
Friday, May 29, 2009
2009 Lincoln MKS Review
Lincoln’s MKS flagship is aimed directly at Generation X buyers, folks who can afford mid-luxury and expect both comfort and cutting edge technology.
Loosely based on a highly evolved Volvo S80 platform, MKS seats four or five with, according to Lincoln, Best In Class rear seat room. And yes, they did benchmark competitors Cadillac CTS and Lexus GS for ride, handling, and luxury.
The MKS platform uses significantly revised and re-engineered front and rear suspensions compared to its S80 and Taurus ancestors. Its engine is a 3.7-liter version of the 3.5-liter Duratec V6 and MKS will be among the first to get Ford’s Turbocharged, Direct Gasoline Injection engine that it calls EcoBoost.
More to the point for younger buyers, it has the most advanced technology suite available in a Ford vehicle. MKS prices start at $38,465 for front wheel drive versions and $40,355 for all wheel drive vehicles like the one we tested and Lincoln thinks 62% will add on the $5,995 Ultimate package of high technology, double-panel moonroof, next generation navigation, and more elegant inset suede seat center panel that we had.
I don’t go off into speculation (in print) too often, but here goes. I think that, more than any other company, Ford understands the lure of technology to younger buyers. Sure, a few are gear heads like their parents, more are seduced by elegance and an iPod—GameBoy—WideScreen driving experience. MKS has all the cool toys, better thought out and better evolved, than others. SYNC, iPod navigation and selection, hard drive juke box, streaming BlueTooth audi and mobile phone. And it operates naturally and seamlessly, from voice commands, touch screen controls, and direct single action controls. You can easily turn things on, change channels or temperature, or call anyone in your phone book while listening to any music you’ve brought into the vehicle.
Luxury technology features include SIRIUS Travel Link’s satellite-delivered content like real time traffic, weather, fuel prices, and sports scores displayed on an optional 8” touch-screen and voice activated navigation system that, at $2,995 includes THX II audio system ($645 stand alone) and rearview camera. Also available is a radar-based Adaptive Cruise control with four distance settings, adaptive headlamps with auto high beam, forward sensing, and radio frequency keyless entry system with push-button starting. Ford’s “Intelligent Access” system uses receivers in the trunk, car, and a dedicated short-range transponder in the glove box; its close coupling prevents external RF interference and make automatic recognition and door unlocking perfect. My experience? I had to use the remote, not just grab a door handle as I can with other systems.
I really like Lexus’ Mark Levinson sound system. That said, THX II (it is a certification by Lucas, not a manufacturer) offers a distinctly different aural experience; both are simply amazing and better than most home audio systems by far.
Interiors are as luxurious as any in its class and better than many. Embossing-free leather, hand stitching, and a glove box with single exposed shut line create the most handsome Lincoln interior in recent memory. Leather seats by Bridge of Weir, Scotland, use chromium-free tanning and are the softest ever used in a Lincoln. Wood or aluminum surfaces are natural products, and from recycled sources where possible. For instance, the ebony used in some models is reclaimed.
Standard passenger and driver seats are 12-way adjustable and both heated and cooled; rear seats are heated. Sill plates and rocker panels are recessed to reduce likelihood a passenger or driver will dirty trousers or skirt entering or departing.
Exterior styling is derived from the MKR and MKT concepts, and its “split wing” waterfall grille claims heritage from the 1941 Lincoln, according to design chief Peter Horbury. The waterfall “may evolve into other patterns, …bounded by the twin rounded rectangles within a few models,” but “the split wing kidney’s uninterrupted flow into headlamp assemblies will remain,” Peter Horbury, Ford’s just-departed chief designer told me.
Flanks are smooth, a single accent line leads from headlight to tail lamp and the rear quarter is muscular, particularly strong over rear wheel arches.
I honestly doubt a majority of buyers will care much that MKS is powered by a 3.7-liter engine based on the die-cast aluminum block four-valve Duratec to produce 273 hp and 265 lb-ft of torque on regular grade fuel (on recommended premium, 275 hp and 276 lb-ft of torque.) Equipped with variable valve timing, the engine achieves over 25 mpg in real world freeway driving, according to chief engineer Mike Celentino, and uses a two-speed fuel pump that runs in a low energy state whenever possible. It also uses what Ford calls Aggressive Deceleration Fuel Shut-Off (ADFSO) to totally eliminate fuel flow to injectors when the driver lifts completely off the throttle, as in exiting a freeway, if in fifth or sixth gear. In 2009, MKS will receive the first EcoBoost engine. That 3.5-liter twin turbocharged, direct injection engine is expected to produce 340 horsepower and 340+ lb-ft of torque.
The SelectShift six-speed automatic co-developed with GM debuted on MKS. It incorporates manual gear selection and a stiffer torque converter. The wide ratio transmission uses tighter spacing in first, second, and third gears with wider overdrive gears for fuel economy estimated at 17/24 for FWD or 16/23 for AWD cars. The optional AWD system can switch up to 100% of torque to front or rear wheels.
Suspension uses MacPherson struts with dampers mounted vertically at the outboard end of rear-facing lower control arms. Damping rate is higher and spring rates are lower than was typical for Lincoln. Wheel and tire packages range from standard 18”, to two 19” cast aluminum wheels, and 11-spoke 20” polished aluminum.
Engineers say 35 individual actions were undertaken to produce a quiet ride including use of 6 mm-thick acoustic glass for the windscreen and front windows and an injection-molded rubber dash panel fitted beneath the carpet up to the dash top and back over the cowl to block wind and powertrain noise. A similar panel is used inside rear wheel wells. All that means is this is a very quiet ride indeed.
Standard MKS features include 18” machined and painted cast aluminum wheels, leather seats, SIRIUS satellite radio, new LED-illuminated SecuriCode hidden push-button door unlock, memory for seats, steering wheel, mirrors and temperature control, HID headlamps, SecuriCode keypad, and the first use of Ford’s EasyFuel capless fuel filler.
Good things abound:
The capless filler works like a NASCAR pit crew’s dream and the car is amazingly quiet and solid, absorbing wretched Michigan pavement debris with absolute calm.
MKS’ suite of electronics alone will draw many buyers into a high-tech nirvana unlike anything offered by others because it simply works.
Automatic switching of high-beams on / off in response to traffic works surprisingly well, even in urban locations and the instrument panel is reminiscent of Lexus without the expense.
Room for improvement:
Better fuel economy than mid-20s would be nice and should arrive with EcoBoost. So should a bit more power, though MKS has its share.
Door openings need to be wider for entry of older or handicapped persons and the narrow and deep trunk opening limits wheelchair storage.
This is a great time to buy a car, if you can. I think Ford and Lincoln provide non-enthusiast drivers with a value alternative to Cadillac, Lexus, Infinity and others that will actually stun newcomers to the Lincoln showroom. Style, grace, usefulness, comfort—MKS offers all of those in a package that will do a better job of easing long commutes than its competition.
Author’s Note: No attempt at completeness
Loosely based on a highly evolved Volvo S80 platform, MKS seats four or five with, according to Lincoln, Best In Class rear seat room. And yes, they did benchmark competitors Cadillac CTS and Lexus GS for ride, handling, and luxury.
The MKS platform uses significantly revised and re-engineered front and rear suspensions compared to its S80 and Taurus ancestors. Its engine is a 3.7-liter version of the 3.5-liter Duratec V6 and MKS will be among the first to get Ford’s Turbocharged, Direct Gasoline Injection engine that it calls EcoBoost.
More to the point for younger buyers, it has the most advanced technology suite available in a Ford vehicle. MKS prices start at $38,465 for front wheel drive versions and $40,355 for all wheel drive vehicles like the one we tested and Lincoln thinks 62% will add on the $5,995 Ultimate package of high technology, double-panel moonroof, next generation navigation, and more elegant inset suede seat center panel that we had.
I don’t go off into speculation (in print) too often, but here goes. I think that, more than any other company, Ford understands the lure of technology to younger buyers. Sure, a few are gear heads like their parents, more are seduced by elegance and an iPod—GameBoy—WideScreen driving experience. MKS has all the cool toys, better thought out and better evolved, than others. SYNC, iPod navigation and selection, hard drive juke box, streaming BlueTooth audi and mobile phone. And it operates naturally and seamlessly, from voice commands, touch screen controls, and direct single action controls. You can easily turn things on, change channels or temperature, or call anyone in your phone book while listening to any music you’ve brought into the vehicle.
Luxury technology features include SIRIUS Travel Link’s satellite-delivered content like real time traffic, weather, fuel prices, and sports scores displayed on an optional 8” touch-screen and voice activated navigation system that, at $2,995 includes THX II audio system ($645 stand alone) and rearview camera. Also available is a radar-based Adaptive Cruise control with four distance settings, adaptive headlamps with auto high beam, forward sensing, and radio frequency keyless entry system with push-button starting. Ford’s “Intelligent Access” system uses receivers in the trunk, car, and a dedicated short-range transponder in the glove box; its close coupling prevents external RF interference and make automatic recognition and door unlocking perfect. My experience? I had to use the remote, not just grab a door handle as I can with other systems.
I really like Lexus’ Mark Levinson sound system. That said, THX II (it is a certification by Lucas, not a manufacturer) offers a distinctly different aural experience; both are simply amazing and better than most home audio systems by far.
Interiors are as luxurious as any in its class and better than many. Embossing-free leather, hand stitching, and a glove box with single exposed shut line create the most handsome Lincoln interior in recent memory. Leather seats by Bridge of Weir, Scotland, use chromium-free tanning and are the softest ever used in a Lincoln. Wood or aluminum surfaces are natural products, and from recycled sources where possible. For instance, the ebony used in some models is reclaimed.
Standard passenger and driver seats are 12-way adjustable and both heated and cooled; rear seats are heated. Sill plates and rocker panels are recessed to reduce likelihood a passenger or driver will dirty trousers or skirt entering or departing.
Exterior styling is derived from the MKR and MKT concepts, and its “split wing” waterfall grille claims heritage from the 1941 Lincoln, according to design chief Peter Horbury. The waterfall “may evolve into other patterns, …bounded by the twin rounded rectangles within a few models,” but “the split wing kidney’s uninterrupted flow into headlamp assemblies will remain,” Peter Horbury, Ford’s just-departed chief designer told me.
Flanks are smooth, a single accent line leads from headlight to tail lamp and the rear quarter is muscular, particularly strong over rear wheel arches.
I honestly doubt a majority of buyers will care much that MKS is powered by a 3.7-liter engine based on the die-cast aluminum block four-valve Duratec to produce 273 hp and 265 lb-ft of torque on regular grade fuel (on recommended premium, 275 hp and 276 lb-ft of torque.) Equipped with variable valve timing, the engine achieves over 25 mpg in real world freeway driving, according to chief engineer Mike Celentino, and uses a two-speed fuel pump that runs in a low energy state whenever possible. It also uses what Ford calls Aggressive Deceleration Fuel Shut-Off (ADFSO) to totally eliminate fuel flow to injectors when the driver lifts completely off the throttle, as in exiting a freeway, if in fifth or sixth gear. In 2009, MKS will receive the first EcoBoost engine. That 3.5-liter twin turbocharged, direct injection engine is expected to produce 340 horsepower and 340+ lb-ft of torque.
The SelectShift six-speed automatic co-developed with GM debuted on MKS. It incorporates manual gear selection and a stiffer torque converter. The wide ratio transmission uses tighter spacing in first, second, and third gears with wider overdrive gears for fuel economy estimated at 17/24 for FWD or 16/23 for AWD cars. The optional AWD system can switch up to 100% of torque to front or rear wheels.
Suspension uses MacPherson struts with dampers mounted vertically at the outboard end of rear-facing lower control arms. Damping rate is higher and spring rates are lower than was typical for Lincoln. Wheel and tire packages range from standard 18”, to two 19” cast aluminum wheels, and 11-spoke 20” polished aluminum.
Engineers say 35 individual actions were undertaken to produce a quiet ride including use of 6 mm-thick acoustic glass for the windscreen and front windows and an injection-molded rubber dash panel fitted beneath the carpet up to the dash top and back over the cowl to block wind and powertrain noise. A similar panel is used inside rear wheel wells. All that means is this is a very quiet ride indeed.
Standard MKS features include 18” machined and painted cast aluminum wheels, leather seats, SIRIUS satellite radio, new LED-illuminated SecuriCode hidden push-button door unlock, memory for seats, steering wheel, mirrors and temperature control, HID headlamps, SecuriCode keypad, and the first use of Ford’s EasyFuel capless fuel filler.
Good things abound:
The capless filler works like a NASCAR pit crew’s dream and the car is amazingly quiet and solid, absorbing wretched Michigan pavement debris with absolute calm.
MKS’ suite of electronics alone will draw many buyers into a high-tech nirvana unlike anything offered by others because it simply works.
Automatic switching of high-beams on / off in response to traffic works surprisingly well, even in urban locations and the instrument panel is reminiscent of Lexus without the expense.
Room for improvement:
Better fuel economy than mid-20s would be nice and should arrive with EcoBoost. So should a bit more power, though MKS has its share.
Door openings need to be wider for entry of older or handicapped persons and the narrow and deep trunk opening limits wheelchair storage.
This is a great time to buy a car, if you can. I think Ford and Lincoln provide non-enthusiast drivers with a value alternative to Cadillac, Lexus, Infinity and others that will actually stun newcomers to the Lincoln showroom. Style, grace, usefulness, comfort—MKS offers all of those in a package that will do a better job of easing long commutes than its competition.
Author’s Note: No attempt at completeness
Toyota's teflon image shows cracks
Toyota’s surprising $7.7 billion fourth-quarter loss isn’t the company’s only headache. Its image has taken a hit, too. The Reputation Institute, which ranks the corporate image of the 600 largest companies in the world, put Toyota at 59th this year. The company was tops last year. Even worse, Toyota ranked behind Honda among carmakers this year. The chief reason, says Anthony Johndrow, managing partner of the Reputation Institute, was the company’s slipping financial results. Toyota lost money for all of fiscal 2009, which just ended on March 31. Honda made money for the year, so the company is gaining clout.
To get back on top, Toyota will need to show better financial results, Johndrow says. But Toyota has said that it doesn’t want to close plants. The company says that when car sales rebound, it will need its workers and factories to satiate pent-up demand. Plus, Toyota has always been loath to cut workers. That will make for a tough test. Toyota said it will lose money this year without a sales rebound, since it plans to pay workers even with slow sales. But if the company must lay people off, its image would take a hit, Johndrow says. That’s because the survey takes into account how friendly an employer a company can be. So unless Toyota can find a way to keep layoffs and losses to a minimum, managing its reputation will be difficult. On the plus side, Toyota’s survey results show that the company is still widely respected, just not like it used to be
To get back on top, Toyota will need to show better financial results, Johndrow says. But Toyota has said that it doesn’t want to close plants. The company says that when car sales rebound, it will need its workers and factories to satiate pent-up demand. Plus, Toyota has always been loath to cut workers. That will make for a tough test. Toyota said it will lose money this year without a sales rebound, since it plans to pay workers even with slow sales. But if the company must lay people off, its image would take a hit, Johndrow says. That’s because the survey takes into account how friendly an employer a company can be. So unless Toyota can find a way to keep layoffs and losses to a minimum, managing its reputation will be difficult. On the plus side, Toyota’s survey results show that the company is still widely respected, just not like it used to be
Ford debuts its new powerful Ecoboost V-6
Romeo -- Ford Motor Co. finally finished talking about its Ecoboost powertrain and let journalists drive it
Thursday at the automaker's Michigan Proving Grounds here.
"I've been talking about Ecoboost for two years," said Barb Samardzich, Ford's vice president of powertrain
engineering. "All of the talking is over."
The 3.5-liter twin turbocharged direct injection V-6 rocket of an engine is Ford's answer to the V-8. It's
smaller, more efficient and, in many cases, more powerful than many of the V-8s it will compete against.
It debuts in four models this year: the all-new 2010 Lincoln MKT large crossover; the 2010 MKS large
sedan; the 2010 Ford Flex; and the 2010 Ford Taurus.
The engine roll-out marks the next step in Ford's sustainability plan, as the automaker upgrades its lineup
with better engines and more sophisticated transmissions.
By 2013, Ford will offer an Ecoboost engine in 90 percent of its nameplates and six-speed transmissions in
100 percent of its vehicles, Samardzich said.
"Friendly to the environment and uncompromising power can go hand in hand," said Kate Pearce, the MKT
marketing manager. "You can now get V-8 performance with V-6 fuel economy."
Indeed. When testing the MKT, I averaged 21.2 miles per gallon in a five-mile loop at 70 mph. In the MKS,
on the same loop, I averaged 25.6 mpg.
Ford expects to hit at least 16 mpg in the city and 22 mpg on highway when the EPA certifies the vehicle.
The lighter MKS sedan will perform even better, Ford officials said, hitting at least 17 mpg in the city and 24
mpg on the highway.
Brett Hinds, Ford's advance engineering design and development manager, said that the new V-6
improves gas mileage by 10 percent to 20 percent.
Ford debuts its new powerful Ecoboost V-6 engine Page 1 of 2
http://www.printthis.clickability.com/pt/cpt?action=cpt&title=Ford+debuts+its+new+powerful+Ecoboost... 5/29/2009
© Copyright 2008 The Detroit News. All rights reserved.
For the size of those vehicles, the numbers are very impressive. But fuel economy and reduced emissions
are only half of the story. This engine ripples with performance power.
It produces 350 pound-feet of torque at 1,500 rpm. This is belly-squeezing kind of power when you mash
the accelerator. It helps the MKS glide along the track at 120 mph without the slightest hint of strain. It
launches with a fury and provides excellent 40 mph to 70 mph acceleration in both the MKT and MKS in a
matter of a few ticks of the stop watch.
The Ecoboost-equipped Lincolns matched or out performed V-8 equipped models of the Audi Q7 and
Cadillac STS on the same test tracks.
The Lincolns felt quicker and more nimble on the fast track and road course, where both models took
corners at much faster speeds than their competition.
Additionally, the enhanced six-speed transmission, which had to be strengthened to handle the extra
power, was extremely smooth shifting through the gears, whether automatically or by the paddle shifters
mounted on the steering wheel.
As the new models roll out later this year with the all-new power train, the difference will be noticeable for
any driver. The only thing missing is that deep-throated rumble of the V-8. But the better gas mileage, and
the fact that this turbocharged engine can run on regular 87 octane gasoline instead of premium, could
make a difference for customers.
When it comes to driving, talk is cheap and Ecoboost's performance speaks for itself.
Find this article at:
http://www.detnews.com/article/20090515/OPINION03/905150394/Ford-debuts-its-new-powerful-Ecoboost-V-6-engine
Thursday at the automaker's Michigan Proving Grounds here.
"I've been talking about Ecoboost for two years," said Barb Samardzich, Ford's vice president of powertrain
engineering. "All of the talking is over."
The 3.5-liter twin turbocharged direct injection V-6 rocket of an engine is Ford's answer to the V-8. It's
smaller, more efficient and, in many cases, more powerful than many of the V-8s it will compete against.
It debuts in four models this year: the all-new 2010 Lincoln MKT large crossover; the 2010 MKS large
sedan; the 2010 Ford Flex; and the 2010 Ford Taurus.
The engine roll-out marks the next step in Ford's sustainability plan, as the automaker upgrades its lineup
with better engines and more sophisticated transmissions.
By 2013, Ford will offer an Ecoboost engine in 90 percent of its nameplates and six-speed transmissions in
100 percent of its vehicles, Samardzich said.
"Friendly to the environment and uncompromising power can go hand in hand," said Kate Pearce, the MKT
marketing manager. "You can now get V-8 performance with V-6 fuel economy."
Indeed. When testing the MKT, I averaged 21.2 miles per gallon in a five-mile loop at 70 mph. In the MKS,
on the same loop, I averaged 25.6 mpg.
Ford expects to hit at least 16 mpg in the city and 22 mpg on highway when the EPA certifies the vehicle.
The lighter MKS sedan will perform even better, Ford officials said, hitting at least 17 mpg in the city and 24
mpg on the highway.
Brett Hinds, Ford's advance engineering design and development manager, said that the new V-6
improves gas mileage by 10 percent to 20 percent.
Ford debuts its new powerful Ecoboost V-6 engine Page 1 of 2
http://www.printthis.clickability.com/pt/cpt?action=cpt&title=Ford+debuts+its+new+powerful+Ecoboost... 5/29/2009
© Copyright 2008 The Detroit News. All rights reserved.
For the size of those vehicles, the numbers are very impressive. But fuel economy and reduced emissions
are only half of the story. This engine ripples with performance power.
It produces 350 pound-feet of torque at 1,500 rpm. This is belly-squeezing kind of power when you mash
the accelerator. It helps the MKS glide along the track at 120 mph without the slightest hint of strain. It
launches with a fury and provides excellent 40 mph to 70 mph acceleration in both the MKT and MKS in a
matter of a few ticks of the stop watch.
The Ecoboost-equipped Lincolns matched or out performed V-8 equipped models of the Audi Q7 and
Cadillac STS on the same test tracks.
The Lincolns felt quicker and more nimble on the fast track and road course, where both models took
corners at much faster speeds than their competition.
Additionally, the enhanced six-speed transmission, which had to be strengthened to handle the extra
power, was extremely smooth shifting through the gears, whether automatically or by the paddle shifters
mounted on the steering wheel.
As the new models roll out later this year with the all-new power train, the difference will be noticeable for
any driver. The only thing missing is that deep-throated rumble of the V-8. But the better gas mileage, and
the fact that this turbocharged engine can run on regular 87 octane gasoline instead of premium, could
make a difference for customers.
When it comes to driving, talk is cheap and Ecoboost's performance speaks for itself.
Find this article at:
http://www.detnews.com/article/20090515/OPINION03/905150394/Ford-debuts-its-new-powerful-Ecoboost-V-6-engine
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
61% Say Ford More Likely To Survive Than GM or Chrysler
Most Americans think the Ford Motor Company, the one Big Three automaker who won’t be run by the federal government, has the best chance of staying in business, but they also suspect the government won’t make it easy.
Sixty-one percent (61%) of Americans say Ford is the Big Three auto company which has the best chance of surviving and becoming profitable again, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey.
Just 17% give General Motors the edge, and only five percent (5%) say Chrysler is the company most likely to survive and profit.
Investors are even more bullish on Ford. Sixty-nine percent (69%) say that company has the best chance of returning to profitability.
Seventy-one percent (71%) of Republicans, 54% of Democrats and 64% of adults not affiliated with either party agree.
Fifty-one percent (51%) of all Americans say they are more likely to buy a car from Ford because it did not take bailout funding from the government. Twelve percent (12%) say they are less likely to do so, and 33% say the bailouts will have no impact on their car-buying decisions.
Sixty-two percent (62%) of Republicans and 60% of unaffiliateds are more likely to buy a Ford, compared to 37% of Democrats. Sixty-one percent (61%) of those who work for a private company share that view versus 44% of government workers.
While Chrysler is already going through a government-supervised bankruptcy to stay in business and GM is likely to follow by Monday, just 25% of Americans say they would buy a car from a bankrupt automaker.
But 58% of Americans say it is at least somewhat likely that the government as the majority owner of GM and Chrysler will pass laws and regulations giving those companies an unfair advantage over Ford. Thirty-four percent (34%) say it is Very Likely. These numbers are unchanged from a month ago, although the GM bankruptcy now seems even more likely.
Twenty-three percent (23%) say it’s not very likely that the government will give an unfair advantage to GM and Chrysler, and six percent (6%) say it’s not at all likely to happen.
Seventy percent (70%) of Republicans say the government is likely to give GM and Chrysler an edge over Ford. Democrats and unaffiliateds are less skeptical, but majorities of both groups suspect that the government is likely to handicap Ford.
Fifty-five percent (55%) of investors believe the government is at least somewhat likely to help GM and Chrysler to have an unfair advantage over their rival.
Only 18% of Americans think the United Auto Workers union and the federal government will do a good job running Chrysler and General Motors.
Voters have consistently for months opposed taxpayer-backed bailouts for the troubled auto companies, although the Political Class has strongly disagreed. That’s because most voters say GM or Chrysler is at least somewhat likely to go out of business over the next few years anyway.
Voters overwhelmingly now believe that the economy can recover even if GM goes out of business.
Sixty-one percent (61%) of Americans say Ford is the Big Three auto company which has the best chance of surviving and becoming profitable again, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey.
Just 17% give General Motors the edge, and only five percent (5%) say Chrysler is the company most likely to survive and profit.
Investors are even more bullish on Ford. Sixty-nine percent (69%) say that company has the best chance of returning to profitability.
Seventy-one percent (71%) of Republicans, 54% of Democrats and 64% of adults not affiliated with either party agree.
Fifty-one percent (51%) of all Americans say they are more likely to buy a car from Ford because it did not take bailout funding from the government. Twelve percent (12%) say they are less likely to do so, and 33% say the bailouts will have no impact on their car-buying decisions.
Sixty-two percent (62%) of Republicans and 60% of unaffiliateds are more likely to buy a Ford, compared to 37% of Democrats. Sixty-one percent (61%) of those who work for a private company share that view versus 44% of government workers.
While Chrysler is already going through a government-supervised bankruptcy to stay in business and GM is likely to follow by Monday, just 25% of Americans say they would buy a car from a bankrupt automaker.
But 58% of Americans say it is at least somewhat likely that the government as the majority owner of GM and Chrysler will pass laws and regulations giving those companies an unfair advantage over Ford. Thirty-four percent (34%) say it is Very Likely. These numbers are unchanged from a month ago, although the GM bankruptcy now seems even more likely.
Twenty-three percent (23%) say it’s not very likely that the government will give an unfair advantage to GM and Chrysler, and six percent (6%) say it’s not at all likely to happen.
Seventy percent (70%) of Republicans say the government is likely to give GM and Chrysler an edge over Ford. Democrats and unaffiliateds are less skeptical, but majorities of both groups suspect that the government is likely to handicap Ford.
Fifty-five percent (55%) of investors believe the government is at least somewhat likely to help GM and Chrysler to have an unfair advantage over their rival.
Only 18% of Americans think the United Auto Workers union and the federal government will do a good job running Chrysler and General Motors.
Voters have consistently for months opposed taxpayer-backed bailouts for the troubled auto companies, although the Political Class has strongly disagreed. That’s because most voters say GM or Chrysler is at least somewhat likely to go out of business over the next few years anyway.
Voters overwhelmingly now believe that the economy can recover even if GM goes out of business.
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
National Fuel Economy Standard
Today, President Obama announced the framework to develop a new national standard for fuel economy that promises to provide a clear and achievable pathway for the auto industry to significantly improve fuel efficiency, reduce greenhouse gas emissions and make progress toward energy independence.
Ford President and CEO Alan Mulally, along with other industry and government leaders, joined President Obama at the White House today for the announcement of this decisive and positive action. Although much work remains, this important step allows us to move toward a final regulation that all stakeholders can support for the good of our customers. We salute the cooperative efforts of the Obama Administration, the state of California, environmental groups and others that played a constructive role in this process, and we welcome the opportunity to work with the federal agencies to finalize the standards.
Rather than 14 separate state requirements, we will now have a single, harmonized federal standard that will allow us to deliver the full range of products in our portfolio to meet our customers’ needs. This addresses our concern about state-by-state standards, which had the potential to force us to restrict products in certain states where the mix of vehicles sold have lower fuel economy than the national average.
While meeting these tough new regulations will require significant financial resources and continued technological advancements, Ford is fully committed to not only meeting the federal standard but also delivering on our promise to provide the best or among the best fuel economy with every new vehicle we introduce – just as we’ve done with our new Ford Fusion, Fusion Hybrid, Mercury Milan, Milan Hybrid and F-150, among others.
Just this morning, we celebrated the beginning of production of the first of our advanced new EcoBoost engines in Cleveland. EcoBoost – which delivers the performance feel of larger displacement engines with the fuel economy of smaller ones – will first be available this summer on the 2010 Lincoln MKS, Lincoln MKT, Ford Taurus SHO and Ford Flex. It will be available on 90 percent of Ford’s nameplates by 2013.
We are equally committed to bringing to market more small cars, hybrids and electric vehicles.
Significantly improving fuel economy and reducing greenhouse gas emissions are core to Ford’s mission to deliver great products, a stronger company and a better world.
For more information about Ford’s comprehensive blueprint for sustainability, visit www.at.ford.com.
Thanks for you continued commitment to Ford.
Ford President and CEO Alan Mulally, along with other industry and government leaders, joined President Obama at the White House today for the announcement of this decisive and positive action. Although much work remains, this important step allows us to move toward a final regulation that all stakeholders can support for the good of our customers. We salute the cooperative efforts of the Obama Administration, the state of California, environmental groups and others that played a constructive role in this process, and we welcome the opportunity to work with the federal agencies to finalize the standards.
Rather than 14 separate state requirements, we will now have a single, harmonized federal standard that will allow us to deliver the full range of products in our portfolio to meet our customers’ needs. This addresses our concern about state-by-state standards, which had the potential to force us to restrict products in certain states where the mix of vehicles sold have lower fuel economy than the national average.
While meeting these tough new regulations will require significant financial resources and continued technological advancements, Ford is fully committed to not only meeting the federal standard but also delivering on our promise to provide the best or among the best fuel economy with every new vehicle we introduce – just as we’ve done with our new Ford Fusion, Fusion Hybrid, Mercury Milan, Milan Hybrid and F-150, among others.
Just this morning, we celebrated the beginning of production of the first of our advanced new EcoBoost engines in Cleveland. EcoBoost – which delivers the performance feel of larger displacement engines with the fuel economy of smaller ones – will first be available this summer on the 2010 Lincoln MKS, Lincoln MKT, Ford Taurus SHO and Ford Flex. It will be available on 90 percent of Ford’s nameplates by 2013.
We are equally committed to bringing to market more small cars, hybrids and electric vehicles.
Significantly improving fuel economy and reducing greenhouse gas emissions are core to Ford’s mission to deliver great products, a stronger company and a better world.
For more information about Ford’s comprehensive blueprint for sustainability, visit www.at.ford.com.
Thanks for you continued commitment to Ford.
Friday, May 15, 2009
Ford F-150 riding high on new design
BY JOHN STEIN
If you talk to pickup enthusiasts, these are not just folks who like the image of the hard-working utilitarian vehicle, but individuals who rely on the modern workhorse to get the job done every day. You will see extreme loyalty to brands. Since 1948, there have been millions of Ford trucks sold and they have performed more tasks than you could imagine on farms, construction sites and for park districts across America. Sounds like the kind of thing that creates legends. If not, it sure comes close in my book.
Talking to Ford about the F-150 is like talking to the Bulls about Michael Jordan or to the Bears about franchise quarterbacks. On one hand you knew when you were at the top who got you there, and when things were not going so well you knew where you had to put your attention to go to the next level.
» Click to enlarge image
2009 Ford F-150
» Click to enlarge image
2009 Ford F-150
Painfully, if ignored, your franchise players can slip away, leaving you wondering what might have been if you had only made the decisions that would have kept you at the top. Well, the folks at Ford decided to be proactive and head out to talk to F-150 owners across the country to get their feedback on what customers wanted from their next truck.
What they wanted is what you see in the new 2009 Ford F-150 pickup.
One of the great things about the Ford F-150 is also one of the maddening things that drives me crazy (in a good way). Going in to shop for an F-150 reminds me of shopping for a new computer. There are so many options and variations, looks and designs. You have to start out with what suits your day-to-day requirements, add some fun special bells and whistles and always be sure you have enough power to do the things you must do every day. The same goes for the F-150 - and it is so much prettier (in a tough, take-no-prisoners way, for sure).
The 2009 Ford F-150 comes in three cab styles: Regular, SuperCab and SuperCrew; in three V-8 powertrain options; in 6.5-, 5.5- and 8-foot boxes; and in 4x2 and 4x4 configurations. Base prices for the 2009 F-150 start at $21,095. That's a great price to instantly buy you a little cred and a lot of opportunity to turn yourself into one tough cowboy.
I love the styling on the new F-150. It is contemporary without being un-trucklike. That simply means it looks tough, a really important part of any pickup that takes itself serious. My tester had an impressive chrome package ($1,420) that really amped up the class factor. This may not be the look for the rancher or the park district, but for the road warrior that may never hit the dirt it is a great option.
The engine on my 4x4 SuperCab was the brutish 24-valve 5.4-liter Triton V-8, which delivered 320 horsepower and 390 lb.-ft. of torque. The powerplant was mated to a flawless 6-speed automatic. The EPA mileage per gallon ratings was 14/18, not great, but par for the pickup class at this size. The good thing is the 36-gallon fuel tank will help minimize stops.
When you are talking pickups, you have to talk engine ranges and F-150 has several options in the 16-valve, 4.6-liter 248-horsepower V-8 linked to 4-speed automatic with 294 lb.-ft. of torque; and the 24-valve, 4.6-liter V-8 coupled to a six-speed automatic with horsepower ratings of 292 and torque of 320 lb.-ft.
I found the big Triton powerplant to be extremely responsive in city driving situation and more than capable getting around in highway traffic. I cannot speak for having a serious payload weighing me down, but I get the sense this F-150 is up for anything you can throw at it.
Inside the cabin of the F-150 I found great room and much thought put into the design and arrangement of gauges and control centers. The dash is thoughtfully laid out in front of the driver. Power adjustable pedals and driver's seat make getting the perfect seating position a breeze. You sit high in the F-150 and sightlines are very good. My tester had a nice rear view camera option ($450) that made maneuvering the big truck a lot easier.
A long list of options made the interior a great place to be. From the really nice power-sliding back window ($250) and the upgrade 6-disc stereo ($300) to the Sirius Satellite Radio ($195) to the amazing (a $395 must-have) SYNC system that allows you to link up your command center in the truck to your cell phone and iPod, the new F-150 has really earned all those awards it has garnered so far this year.
The automaker boasts that its all-new 2009 F-150 has a class-leading towing ability of 11,300 pounds and a cargo-carrying rating of 3,030 pounds. According to Ford, improvements to the chassis have helped with torsional rigidity and make delivering the additional payload and towing abilities possible.
Some features worth mentioning are the thoughtful capless fuel filler that automatically opens with the fuel door and seals shut to reduce fueling emissions and a great tailgate step that allows the buyer to easily access the cargo bed with a integrated step ladder, a lot easier than trying to launch yourself into the truck's bed.
Ford made sure they had all the information they needed about their franchise player, they got feedback on what their customers wanted and responded with a great truck. The new F-150 shows it can help Ford stay at the top of the pickup heap for some time to come.
If you talk to pickup enthusiasts, these are not just folks who like the image of the hard-working utilitarian vehicle, but individuals who rely on the modern workhorse to get the job done every day. You will see extreme loyalty to brands. Since 1948, there have been millions of Ford trucks sold and they have performed more tasks than you could imagine on farms, construction sites and for park districts across America. Sounds like the kind of thing that creates legends. If not, it sure comes close in my book.
Talking to Ford about the F-150 is like talking to the Bulls about Michael Jordan or to the Bears about franchise quarterbacks. On one hand you knew when you were at the top who got you there, and when things were not going so well you knew where you had to put your attention to go to the next level.
» Click to enlarge image
2009 Ford F-150
» Click to enlarge image
2009 Ford F-150
Painfully, if ignored, your franchise players can slip away, leaving you wondering what might have been if you had only made the decisions that would have kept you at the top. Well, the folks at Ford decided to be proactive and head out to talk to F-150 owners across the country to get their feedback on what customers wanted from their next truck.
What they wanted is what you see in the new 2009 Ford F-150 pickup.
One of the great things about the Ford F-150 is also one of the maddening things that drives me crazy (in a good way). Going in to shop for an F-150 reminds me of shopping for a new computer. There are so many options and variations, looks and designs. You have to start out with what suits your day-to-day requirements, add some fun special bells and whistles and always be sure you have enough power to do the things you must do every day. The same goes for the F-150 - and it is so much prettier (in a tough, take-no-prisoners way, for sure).
The 2009 Ford F-150 comes in three cab styles: Regular, SuperCab and SuperCrew; in three V-8 powertrain options; in 6.5-, 5.5- and 8-foot boxes; and in 4x2 and 4x4 configurations. Base prices for the 2009 F-150 start at $21,095. That's a great price to instantly buy you a little cred and a lot of opportunity to turn yourself into one tough cowboy.
I love the styling on the new F-150. It is contemporary without being un-trucklike. That simply means it looks tough, a really important part of any pickup that takes itself serious. My tester had an impressive chrome package ($1,420) that really amped up the class factor. This may not be the look for the rancher or the park district, but for the road warrior that may never hit the dirt it is a great option.
The engine on my 4x4 SuperCab was the brutish 24-valve 5.4-liter Triton V-8, which delivered 320 horsepower and 390 lb.-ft. of torque. The powerplant was mated to a flawless 6-speed automatic. The EPA mileage per gallon ratings was 14/18, not great, but par for the pickup class at this size. The good thing is the 36-gallon fuel tank will help minimize stops.
When you are talking pickups, you have to talk engine ranges and F-150 has several options in the 16-valve, 4.6-liter 248-horsepower V-8 linked to 4-speed automatic with 294 lb.-ft. of torque; and the 24-valve, 4.6-liter V-8 coupled to a six-speed automatic with horsepower ratings of 292 and torque of 320 lb.-ft.
I found the big Triton powerplant to be extremely responsive in city driving situation and more than capable getting around in highway traffic. I cannot speak for having a serious payload weighing me down, but I get the sense this F-150 is up for anything you can throw at it.
Inside the cabin of the F-150 I found great room and much thought put into the design and arrangement of gauges and control centers. The dash is thoughtfully laid out in front of the driver. Power adjustable pedals and driver's seat make getting the perfect seating position a breeze. You sit high in the F-150 and sightlines are very good. My tester had a nice rear view camera option ($450) that made maneuvering the big truck a lot easier.
A long list of options made the interior a great place to be. From the really nice power-sliding back window ($250) and the upgrade 6-disc stereo ($300) to the Sirius Satellite Radio ($195) to the amazing (a $395 must-have) SYNC system that allows you to link up your command center in the truck to your cell phone and iPod, the new F-150 has really earned all those awards it has garnered so far this year.
The automaker boasts that its all-new 2009 F-150 has a class-leading towing ability of 11,300 pounds and a cargo-carrying rating of 3,030 pounds. According to Ford, improvements to the chassis have helped with torsional rigidity and make delivering the additional payload and towing abilities possible.
Some features worth mentioning are the thoughtful capless fuel filler that automatically opens with the fuel door and seals shut to reduce fueling emissions and a great tailgate step that allows the buyer to easily access the cargo bed with a integrated step ladder, a lot easier than trying to launch yourself into the truck's bed.
Ford made sure they had all the information they needed about their franchise player, they got feedback on what their customers wanted and responded with a great truck. The new F-150 shows it can help Ford stay at the top of the pickup heap for some time to come.
How Ford Restructured Without Federal Help
You're forgiven if you think the Chrysler Bailout is a hot new car that competes with another model called the GM Rescue. Then there is the Ford Forgo, brought to us by the only Detroit auto maker to forgo government assistance, at least so far.
AP
Ford Motor Co. CEO Alan Mulally .
That's good for the taxpayers and for Ford, right? Well, maybe not. While General Motors and Chrysler will emerge from the government restructuring wringer with significantly reduced debt, Ford will still likely be obliged to repay its lenders. This could put Ford at a competitive disadvantage -- an unfortunate irony for the one Detroit car company that has gotten the decisions mostly right in the last few years.
Ford also might emerge from the current crisis as the largest American auto maker for the first time in more than 80 years. GM had 18.6% of the market in the first quarter of this year to Ford's 14.7%. But GM's lead could be wiped out when the company sheds four or five brands to satisfy President Barack Obama's automotive task force.
True, "Largest American Car Company" might by a pyrrhic title these days. Ford just posted a $1.4 billion loss for the first quarter of 2009, after cumulative losses of $30 billion for the prior three years. During those same three years, however, Ford revamped its product offerings to the point where it soon will have a coherent lineup for the first time in a decade. That's a big turnabout for a company whose auto lineup was so unappealing a few years ago that it almost abandoned cars entirely to focus on SUVs and trucks.
In Ford's last big comeback, its midsize sedan, the Taurus, popularized aerodynamic styling and became the best-selling car in America in the mid-1990s.
What happened next would be criminal, except there aren't laws against corporate stupidity. Ford didn't invest to keep the Taurus competitive. Then it announced in 2004 it would kill the Taurus name -- until new CEO Alan Mulally ordered a stay of execution two years later.
The 2010 Taurus, which debuts next month, is a brand new start with sharp styling and the same $25,995 base price as the old, lackluster model. For more money you can add high-tech gadgetry such as forward-looking radar, adaptive cruise control, and a collision-warning system that applies the brakes when you get too close to the car in front of you. Together, these gizmos will allow you to drive from Detroit to Chicago without hitting either the brake or the accelerator. (I wouldn't suggest trying it, however.)
Ford's new Fusion Hybrid, meanwhile, gets 41 miles to the gallon in the city, versus 33 mpg for the Toyota Camry hybrid (with a similar price tag). The difference comes from lots of little things. Ford narrowed the slots on the wheel covers and changed the design of the fog lights, for example, to reduce aerodynamic drag.
Ford announced last week that it's reconfiguring a truck plant in Wayne, Mich., to build the new Focus compact. And a year from now the high-mileage subcompact Fiesta, engineered in Europe, will hit these shores. The Fiesta trails the Honda Civic and the Toyota Yaris in its time of entry to the U.S. market, but the vehicle's sleek styling will make it the best-dressed girl at the dance.
All this begs the question: How did the company develop all these new cars while losing so much money in recent years? The simple answer is that it borrowed billions from private lenders.
In late 2006, shortly after Mr. Mulally arrived from Boeing, the company mortgaged its factories, its equipment, and its real estate. Much of the impetus for this fund raising came from the company's now-departed chief financial officer, Don LeClair, whose pessimistic prognostications irked his colleagues but who proved prescient nonetheless. The company raised $23.6 billion -- the world's largest "home-improvement loan," as Ford officials said at the time -- to finance a complete product overhaul. That's right. There's wasn't a dime of government assistance.
Rival GM also raised money in 2006. Instead of mortgaging assets, however, the company sold 51% of its GMAC financial-services arm to Cerberus (the same private-equity firm that bought Chrysler a year later).
GMAC is now a bank holding company -- and it is reeling from losses of billions of dollars in the subprime mortgage market. GM, meanwhile, burned through its money faster than Ford, which was making tough decisions that GM ducked. Specifically, Ford sold off such cash-draining operations as Jaguar and Land Rover, while GM held on to its outmoded lineup of eight different U.S. brands. As a result, its standout cars -- such as the Chevy Malibu and Cadillac CTS -- got lost in the clutter.
Last week, GM reported a $6 billion loss for the first quarter. The company wants to wipe away 90% of its $27 billion in unsecured debt as part of its path to viability. But to do that it will almost certainly have to follow Chrysler into bankruptcy court. That will be the cleanest and quickest way for GM to get relief from obligations that it can't afford to meet. Beyond this, GMAC's status as a bank holding company qualifies it for government assistance that Ford's lending arm, Ford Motor Credit, can't get.
You can see where this leaves us. Ford has about $26 billion in automotive debt -- about the same as GM's $27 billion. Ford's debt is secured by its assets. And secured lenders must be repaid -- unless they happen to be Chrysler lenders and get clipped by a company bankruptcy plan that's backed by President Obama.
So Ford is like a homeowner who planned prudently and can pay his mortgage, while his spendthrift neighbors get their mortgage reduced by some new federal program.
Ford executives are probably fretting about this, but there isn't much that can be done. They already have exchanged some of their debt for equity, and might do more of that. But the bottom line is that we live in a world where wisdom can be punished and where foolishness can be rewarded.
Ford certainly wouldn't want to trade places with GM or Chrysler right now. Let's just leave it at that.
Mr. Ingrassia, a former Dow Jones executive and Detroit bureau chief for this newspaper, is writing "Crash Course," a book about the auto industry's crisis that will be published next year by Random House.
AP
Ford Motor Co. CEO Alan Mulally .
That's good for the taxpayers and for Ford, right? Well, maybe not. While General Motors and Chrysler will emerge from the government restructuring wringer with significantly reduced debt, Ford will still likely be obliged to repay its lenders. This could put Ford at a competitive disadvantage -- an unfortunate irony for the one Detroit car company that has gotten the decisions mostly right in the last few years.
Ford also might emerge from the current crisis as the largest American auto maker for the first time in more than 80 years. GM had 18.6% of the market in the first quarter of this year to Ford's 14.7%. But GM's lead could be wiped out when the company sheds four or five brands to satisfy President Barack Obama's automotive task force.
True, "Largest American Car Company" might by a pyrrhic title these days. Ford just posted a $1.4 billion loss for the first quarter of 2009, after cumulative losses of $30 billion for the prior three years. During those same three years, however, Ford revamped its product offerings to the point where it soon will have a coherent lineup for the first time in a decade. That's a big turnabout for a company whose auto lineup was so unappealing a few years ago that it almost abandoned cars entirely to focus on SUVs and trucks.
In Ford's last big comeback, its midsize sedan, the Taurus, popularized aerodynamic styling and became the best-selling car in America in the mid-1990s.
What happened next would be criminal, except there aren't laws against corporate stupidity. Ford didn't invest to keep the Taurus competitive. Then it announced in 2004 it would kill the Taurus name -- until new CEO Alan Mulally ordered a stay of execution two years later.
The 2010 Taurus, which debuts next month, is a brand new start with sharp styling and the same $25,995 base price as the old, lackluster model. For more money you can add high-tech gadgetry such as forward-looking radar, adaptive cruise control, and a collision-warning system that applies the brakes when you get too close to the car in front of you. Together, these gizmos will allow you to drive from Detroit to Chicago without hitting either the brake or the accelerator. (I wouldn't suggest trying it, however.)
Ford's new Fusion Hybrid, meanwhile, gets 41 miles to the gallon in the city, versus 33 mpg for the Toyota Camry hybrid (with a similar price tag). The difference comes from lots of little things. Ford narrowed the slots on the wheel covers and changed the design of the fog lights, for example, to reduce aerodynamic drag.
Ford announced last week that it's reconfiguring a truck plant in Wayne, Mich., to build the new Focus compact. And a year from now the high-mileage subcompact Fiesta, engineered in Europe, will hit these shores. The Fiesta trails the Honda Civic and the Toyota Yaris in its time of entry to the U.S. market, but the vehicle's sleek styling will make it the best-dressed girl at the dance.
All this begs the question: How did the company develop all these new cars while losing so much money in recent years? The simple answer is that it borrowed billions from private lenders.
In late 2006, shortly after Mr. Mulally arrived from Boeing, the company mortgaged its factories, its equipment, and its real estate. Much of the impetus for this fund raising came from the company's now-departed chief financial officer, Don LeClair, whose pessimistic prognostications irked his colleagues but who proved prescient nonetheless. The company raised $23.6 billion -- the world's largest "home-improvement loan," as Ford officials said at the time -- to finance a complete product overhaul. That's right. There's wasn't a dime of government assistance.
Rival GM also raised money in 2006. Instead of mortgaging assets, however, the company sold 51% of its GMAC financial-services arm to Cerberus (the same private-equity firm that bought Chrysler a year later).
GMAC is now a bank holding company -- and it is reeling from losses of billions of dollars in the subprime mortgage market. GM, meanwhile, burned through its money faster than Ford, which was making tough decisions that GM ducked. Specifically, Ford sold off such cash-draining operations as Jaguar and Land Rover, while GM held on to its outmoded lineup of eight different U.S. brands. As a result, its standout cars -- such as the Chevy Malibu and Cadillac CTS -- got lost in the clutter.
Last week, GM reported a $6 billion loss for the first quarter. The company wants to wipe away 90% of its $27 billion in unsecured debt as part of its path to viability. But to do that it will almost certainly have to follow Chrysler into bankruptcy court. That will be the cleanest and quickest way for GM to get relief from obligations that it can't afford to meet. Beyond this, GMAC's status as a bank holding company qualifies it for government assistance that Ford's lending arm, Ford Motor Credit, can't get.
You can see where this leaves us. Ford has about $26 billion in automotive debt -- about the same as GM's $27 billion. Ford's debt is secured by its assets. And secured lenders must be repaid -- unless they happen to be Chrysler lenders and get clipped by a company bankruptcy plan that's backed by President Obama.
So Ford is like a homeowner who planned prudently and can pay his mortgage, while his spendthrift neighbors get their mortgage reduced by some new federal program.
Ford executives are probably fretting about this, but there isn't much that can be done. They already have exchanged some of their debt for equity, and might do more of that. But the bottom line is that we live in a world where wisdom can be punished and where foolishness can be rewarded.
Ford certainly wouldn't want to trade places with GM or Chrysler right now. Let's just leave it at that.
Mr. Ingrassia, a former Dow Jones executive and Detroit bureau chief for this newspaper, is writing "Crash Course," a book about the auto industry's crisis that will be published next year by Random House.
Fixing up Ford
By Alex Taylor III, senior editor
(Fortune Magazine) -- Alan Mulally is in my face - again. In fact, he has barely left it for the past two hours. He has taken me through the thick loose-leaf binder he assembled for my interview and shown me another five binders filled with interviews he did upon taking the CEO job at Ford, along with research material and personal notes.
He has given me his opinion on all the stories I've written about Ford (F, Fortune 500) since he took over and, for good measure, the stories I wrote about Boeing back when he worked there. The man is relentless and demands all my attention. He won't let up until he has turned all my "nos" and "maybes" into "yeses."
Call it the Mulally method: this good-natured but relentless insistence on following what he has determined to be the correct course of action. My immersion is taking place around a conference table in his office on the 12th floor of Ford Motor Co.'s world headquarters in Dearborn, Mich.
0:00 /2:44Ford chief: Plan's working
Mulally is sitting so close, he could be in my lap. The office decoration is sparse, but Mulally likes the 180-degree view; Ford's historic River Rouge complex is visible on the horizon, and he says he can keep an eye on General Motors (GM, Fortune 500) and Chrysler from here too. Not that Mulally has much time for window gazing. He's on a crusade to save Ford Motor.
Now he's showing me the corporate mission statement he wrote and had printed on plastic cards and distributed to employees. And here is the hand-drawn diagram he's created just for me (with my name in a cloudburst!) to explain what it all means. In case I hadn't noticed, Mulally says, "I went to a lot of work for this." Trust me, Alan, I noticed.
All this attention is wearing me out - but not Mulally. In the midst of history's second-worst auto depression, Mulally seems to be ... enjoying himself? This is a man who lives less than three miles from his office, arrives there each morning at 5:15 a.m. for a 12-hour workday, and does so with smile. At 63, he still gets enthusiastic about tackling big jobs. "I've always wanted to do something important, and it had to be in a big organization," says Mulally.
You would think once in a lifetime would be enough for the aeronautical engineer in charge of developing the 777 airliner at Boeing (BA, Fortune 500). But here he is, doing it all over again: "What gets me really excited is a big thing where a lot of talented, smart people are involved," he says. Mulally once asked his mother, now 90, "Why am I this way?" She replied, "You've always been this way."
0:00 /2:56Ford adding production
Mulally's being "this way" has, at least for now, kept Ford ahead of GM and Chrysler in the fight for survival. Unlike its traditional rivals, Mulally's Ford insists it has enough cash to ride out the economic downturn and does not want the government loans that the other two companies have accepted.
Ford's financial independence is largely due to a new operational discipline that Mulally has installed, as well as some timely strategic moves he initiated. So while GM suffered the ignominy of seeing the Treasury Department's auto task force depose chairman and CEO Rick Wagoner, and Chrysler has declared bankruptcy, Ford stands alone as an independent company and, potentially, a Detroit survivor. "Alan was the right choice [to be CEO], and it gets more right every day," says executive chairman Bill Ford, the man who hired him.
Ford Motor is still losing money, like nearly every other automaker, but it shows signs of recovery. In the U.S. its market share of retail sales to individuals (as opposed to wholesale sales to fleet customers) has gone up in six of the past seven months. It has negotiated four new agreements with the United Auto Workers, bringing its hourly labor cost down from $76 an hour to $55 an hour and, Ford says, promising to make it competitive with Toyota (TM). While GM and Chrysler are hoarding cash, Ford actually laid out $2.4 billion in March to pay down $10.1 billion in long-term debt. Its share price has increased nearly fivefold since hitting a low in November.
'Pretty relentless'
Mulally, who was hired as CEO in September 2006, hasn't engineered, designed, or built any cars. But he has devised a plan that identifies specific goals for the company, created a process that moves it toward those goals, and installed a system to make sure it gets there. Mulally watches all this with intensity - and demands weekly, sometimes daily, updates. "Alan's style is pretty relentless," says chief financial officer Lewis Booth, a 31-year Ford veteran. "He says, 'If this is the reality, what are we going to do about it?' not 'We're going to work our way through it.'"
The Mulally method has pointed Ford to some smart strategic moves. Sensing a recession in 2006, Mulally decided to borrow $23.6 billion against Ford's assets. Piling on more debt wasn't an easy call, but the extra cash meant that Ford could say no to government loans when sales fell apart last year. Mulally is moving to integrate the company globally, despite several failed attempts in the past. In 2010, Ford will be selling small cars in the U.S. that were developed in Europe. Mulally persuaded Bill Ford to dispose of Jaguar and Land Rover and focus its resources on the Ford brand, and by moving quickly he managed to sell them to India's Tata in 2007 when there was still a market for makers of luxury vehicles. He took longer to untangle Volvo from the rest of the company, but he has now put that up for sale too.
Those moves have helped Ford separate from GM and Chrysler, and Mulally is pumped. "As we come through this, we're going to be a turbo machine on the other side," he says. He has promised that Ford's core North American operations, as well as the entire company, will turn profitable by 2011. It had better, because it can't keep losing money indefinitely. Ford recorded a loss of $14.7 billion last year and another $1.4 billion in 2009's first quarter. If the U.S. and the rest of the global economy continue to slump, Ford's survival could be endangered. "The test of Ford's liquidity will be how low vehicle sales go this year, when they recover, and what levels they recover to in 2010 and 2011," writes analyst Shelly Lombard of Gimme Credit.
Besides, Ford hasn't always handled prosperity well. It boomed in the mid-1980s on the strength of the Taurus, pickup trucks, and Lincolns, only to be laid low by the recession of 1990-91. Then it squeezed record profits out of Expeditions, Lincoln Navigators, and pickups - all built on the same platform - in the middle to late 1990s. But a binge of overseas acquisitions, combined with laxity in operations, brought it limping into the 21st century. When Mulally arrived in September 2006, Ford was known mainly for its pickup trucks and the Mustang, and the company was on the verge of collapse. It lost $12.6 billion in 2006 and another $2.7 billion in 2007.
Now, if the economy recovers on schedule, Ford is in a position to thrive. To meet stricter government fuel-economy standards, it is introducing a line of more efficient, smaller-displacement engines with turbocharging, and it will start rolling out electric vehicles in 2010. A healthier Ford will be able to scoop up business from GM and Chrysler as those companies shed brands and models. Goldman Sachs's Patrick Archambault sees Ford picking up 25% of the sales the two companies lose, equivalent to 1.35 points of market share.
So how does an industry outsider like Mulally come into a company as large as Ford - with its 205,000 employees, multiple product lines, and international operations - and straighten it out?
To people like me who follow the industry and find its inner workings infinitely complex, the success of a non-auto person is surprising and, frankly, a little discomfiting. Mulally, after all, was so removed from Detroit ways when Ford hired him that his personal car was a Lexus.
Although there are similarities between building airplanes and making cars - heavy R&D, complex manufacturing, supplier relations, a unionized workforce - there are crucial differences too. Mulally had no experience in mass marketing or dealer relations. Although he has weighed in on model names, brand streamlining (he is allowing Mercury to wither away), and product complexity (he was flabbergasted to hear that engineers had created 132 different center consoles for the Navigator), he leaves product decisions to the professionals.
The story of how Mulally revived Ford's best-known sedan is a quintessential demonstration of the Mulally method - analyzing a situation using accepted facts and then winning over support through persistence. Here's the story, told by Mulally:
"I arrive here, and the first day I say, 'Let's go look at the product lineup.' And they lay it out, and I said, 'Where's the Taurus?' They said, 'Well, we killed it.' I said, 'What do you mean, you killed it?' 'Well, we made a couple that looked like a football. They didn't sell very well, so we stopped it.' 'You stopped the Taurus?' I said. 'How many billions of dollars does it cost to build brand loyalty around a name?' 'Well, we thought it was so damaged that we named it the Five Hundred.' I said, 'Well, you've got until tomorrow to find a vehicle to put the Taurus name on because that's why I'm here. Then you have two years to make the coolest vehicle that you can possibly make.'?" The 2010 Taurus is arriving on the market this spring, and while it is not as startling as the original 1986 Taurus, it is still pretty cool.
A new corporate culture
It's difficult to imagine the reaction of hard-bitten Ford executives to Mulally's arrival. Sharp elbows, fierce loyalties, and frequent turf battles were hallmarks of Ford's management culture: The tough guys won. Despite nearly 40 years in the commercial airplane business - one of the most international of industries - Mulally looks as if he had just left his home state of Kansas. He dresses like a Boy Scout leader - blue blazer, button-down shirt, kiltie loafers - and his open-mouth smile makes him appear bemused or even a bit puzzled by what goes on around him. That corn-fed sincerity, however, masks confidence, discipline, and a fierce desire to win.
"Communicate, communicate, communicate," Mulally explained in one of his notes to me. "Everyone has to know the plan, its status, and areas that need special attention." For instance, Mulally is determined that Ford reduce its dependence on light trucks as gas becomes more expensive, and he has let the entire organization know it in the bluntest possible language. "Everybody says you can't make money off small cars," he says. "Well, you'd better damn well figure out how to make money, because that's where the world is going."
Mulally's openness seems to have won him support throughout the organization. Says manufacturing boss Joe Hinrichs: "Alan brings infectious energy. This is a person people want to follow." Sometimes Mulally verges on guilelessness. In preparation for our interview, he provided me with a one-page summary of his managerial abilities. Titled "Alan's Leadership," it includes some boilerplate - "proven successful leader ... business acumen and judgment ... steady ... true North" - but leavens it with less quantifiable traits: "expects the very best of himself and others, seeks to understand rather than to be understood." I can't imagine another CEO making such a list public. Bill Ford sums Mulally up this way: "Alan is not a very complicated person. He is very driven."
Arriving at Ford, Mulally boned up on the company like a student cramming for an exam, interviewing dozens of employees, analysts, and consultants, and filling those five binders with his typed notes. The research allowed him to develop a point of view about the auto business that now frames all his decisions. Its pillars draw heavily from his experience at Boeing: Focus on the Ford brand ("nobody buys a house of brands"); compete in every market segment with carefully defined products (small, medium, and large; cars, utilities, and trucks); market fewer nameplates (40 worldwide by 2013, down from 97 worldwide in 2006); and become best in class in quality, fuel efficiency, safety, and value.
Are corporate mission statements so 1990s? Not to Mulally. To let everyone know what he had in mind, Mulally created those plastic cards with four goals on one side ("Expected Behaviors") and a revised definition of the company ("One Ford") on the other. To Mulally, it is like sacred text: "This is me. I wrote it. It's what I believe in. You can't make this shit up."
"I am here to save an American and global icon," Mulally declares. He drives performance the way he did at Boeing, with the Business Plan Review, a meeting with his direct reports, held early every Thursday. "I live for Thursday morning at 8 a.m.," he says. First up are Ford's four profit centers: the Americas, Europe, Asia Pacific, and Ford Credit. Then come presentations from 12 functional areas (from product development and manufacturing to human resources and government relations).
"When I arrived there were six or seven people reporting to Bill Ford, and the IT person wasn't there, the human resources person wasn't there," says Mulally. "So I moved up and included every functional discipline on my team because everybody in this place had to be involved and had to know everything."
The Thursday meetings are held in what's known as the Thunderbird Room, one floor below Mulally's office, around a circular dark-wood table fitted with three pairs of videoscreens in the center. Eight clocks, one for each Ford time zone, are mounted on the wall. There are seats for 18 executives around the table, with additional ones on the perimeter ("Here's where I sit," says Mulally, indicating a chair: "Pilot's seat").
There are no pre-meetings or briefing books. "They don't bring their big books anymore because I'm not going to grind them with as many questions as I can to humiliate them," Mulally says. "We'll see them next week. We don't take action - I'm going to see you next week." No BlackBerrys are allowed, and no side conversations either - Mulally is insistent about that. "If somebody starts to talk or they don't respect each other, the meeting just stops. They know I've removed vice presidents because they couldn't stop talking because they thought they were so damn important."
Mulally instituted color coding for reports: green for good, yellow for caution, red for problems. Managers coded their operations green at the first couple of meetings to show how well they were doing, but Mulally called them on it. "You guys, you know we lost a few billion dollars last year," he told the group. "Is there anything that's not going well?" After that the process loosened up. Americas boss Mark Fields went first. He admitted that the Ford Edge, due to arrive at dealers, had some technical problems with the rear lift gate and wasn't ready for the start of production. "The whole place was deathly silent," says Mulally. "Then I clapped, and I said, 'Mark, I really appreciate that clear visibility.' And the next week the entire set of charts were all rainbows."
"If something is off-track, we are much better at identifying it and resolving it," says CFO Booth. "Not everything turns to green. If it doesn't, we have to modify the plan."
To monitor operations during the week, Mulally can visit two adjacent rooms whose walls are lined with 280 performance charts, arranged by area of responsibility, with a big picture of the executive in charge in case there are any doubts. Everyone at the Thursday meeting gets wall space. Mulally spends 30 minutes explaining the charts to me, making sure I stand 20 feet away so that I can't see any of the data. The message, though, comes through clearly: Mulally has his finger on every piece of this large and complex company. So does his board of directors; they see a subset of the same data. There are no secrets at Ford anymore. "This is a huge enterprise, and the magic is, everybody knows the plan," says Mulally.
And everyone seems to be onboard. Chief financial officer Don Leclair became a company hero for arranging the $23.6 billion loan in 2006. But other executives found him hard to work with, and Leclair decided to retire. Mulally doesn't want to have to settle arguments between executives, either. "They can either work together or they can come see me," he says. He demonstrates how infrequently that happens by springing up from his chair, dashing into his outer office, and then racing back and sitting down. He reports that nobody is waiting to see him. "They're not here. There's nobody here. There's nobody outside. So they must be working together." I am speechless, but I get the point.
Will it work?
So far, Mulally has been mostly managing the hand dealt him when he arrived. The first new model to bear his fingerprints will be the restyled 2010 Taurus that goes on sale in June. His plan for "One Ford" won't get a real test until next year when two small, fuel-efficient cars, the Fiesta and the Focus, make their way from Europe to the U.S. It remains an open question whether Americans will be willing to pay more for the smaller, higher-content vehicles. They will have to if Mulally is to succeed in reducing Ford's dependence on pickup truck profits.
The biggest unanswered questions about Mulally are how long he will stay at Ford and who will succeed him. Bill Ford has been saying that he hopes Mulally never leaves, but having spent nearly four decades in Seattle, he isn't likely to settle in Dearborn, and in fact, the company spent $344,109 in 2008 flying Mulally and his family between the two cities and elsewhere. Now that Ford is running more smoothly, there shouldn't be a need to look outside again for his successor. If Mulally leaves when he turns 65, the betting is that he will be succeeded by Booth, who is 60. If Mulally stays longer, then 48-year-old Fields would likely be the choice.
Mulally talks as if he has found a home and is doing the work he was always intended to do. "Something about just being mature, being almost 64, is that I've been there. I've been through a lot of cycles. I'm not up and down. I'm rock-solid, no matter where the bad news comes from. I'm steady. And everybody knows why I'm here. It's not a career move. I'm not trying to get ahead. I am not looking for more awards."
At one of his early meetings with employees upon joining Ford in 2006, Mulally was asked whether Ford would be able to remain in business: "Was Ford going to make it?" "I don't know," Mulally replied. "But we have a plan, and the plan says we are going to make it." It was a moment Mulally's mother would have appreciated.
(Fortune Magazine) -- Alan Mulally is in my face - again. In fact, he has barely left it for the past two hours. He has taken me through the thick loose-leaf binder he assembled for my interview and shown me another five binders filled with interviews he did upon taking the CEO job at Ford, along with research material and personal notes.
He has given me his opinion on all the stories I've written about Ford (F, Fortune 500) since he took over and, for good measure, the stories I wrote about Boeing back when he worked there. The man is relentless and demands all my attention. He won't let up until he has turned all my "nos" and "maybes" into "yeses."
Call it the Mulally method: this good-natured but relentless insistence on following what he has determined to be the correct course of action. My immersion is taking place around a conference table in his office on the 12th floor of Ford Motor Co.'s world headquarters in Dearborn, Mich.
0:00 /2:44Ford chief: Plan's working
Mulally is sitting so close, he could be in my lap. The office decoration is sparse, but Mulally likes the 180-degree view; Ford's historic River Rouge complex is visible on the horizon, and he says he can keep an eye on General Motors (GM, Fortune 500) and Chrysler from here too. Not that Mulally has much time for window gazing. He's on a crusade to save Ford Motor.
Now he's showing me the corporate mission statement he wrote and had printed on plastic cards and distributed to employees. And here is the hand-drawn diagram he's created just for me (with my name in a cloudburst!) to explain what it all means. In case I hadn't noticed, Mulally says, "I went to a lot of work for this." Trust me, Alan, I noticed.
All this attention is wearing me out - but not Mulally. In the midst of history's second-worst auto depression, Mulally seems to be ... enjoying himself? This is a man who lives less than three miles from his office, arrives there each morning at 5:15 a.m. for a 12-hour workday, and does so with smile. At 63, he still gets enthusiastic about tackling big jobs. "I've always wanted to do something important, and it had to be in a big organization," says Mulally.
You would think once in a lifetime would be enough for the aeronautical engineer in charge of developing the 777 airliner at Boeing (BA, Fortune 500). But here he is, doing it all over again: "What gets me really excited is a big thing where a lot of talented, smart people are involved," he says. Mulally once asked his mother, now 90, "Why am I this way?" She replied, "You've always been this way."
0:00 /2:56Ford adding production
Mulally's being "this way" has, at least for now, kept Ford ahead of GM and Chrysler in the fight for survival. Unlike its traditional rivals, Mulally's Ford insists it has enough cash to ride out the economic downturn and does not want the government loans that the other two companies have accepted.
Ford's financial independence is largely due to a new operational discipline that Mulally has installed, as well as some timely strategic moves he initiated. So while GM suffered the ignominy of seeing the Treasury Department's auto task force depose chairman and CEO Rick Wagoner, and Chrysler has declared bankruptcy, Ford stands alone as an independent company and, potentially, a Detroit survivor. "Alan was the right choice [to be CEO], and it gets more right every day," says executive chairman Bill Ford, the man who hired him.
Ford Motor is still losing money, like nearly every other automaker, but it shows signs of recovery. In the U.S. its market share of retail sales to individuals (as opposed to wholesale sales to fleet customers) has gone up in six of the past seven months. It has negotiated four new agreements with the United Auto Workers, bringing its hourly labor cost down from $76 an hour to $55 an hour and, Ford says, promising to make it competitive with Toyota (TM). While GM and Chrysler are hoarding cash, Ford actually laid out $2.4 billion in March to pay down $10.1 billion in long-term debt. Its share price has increased nearly fivefold since hitting a low in November.
'Pretty relentless'
Mulally, who was hired as CEO in September 2006, hasn't engineered, designed, or built any cars. But he has devised a plan that identifies specific goals for the company, created a process that moves it toward those goals, and installed a system to make sure it gets there. Mulally watches all this with intensity - and demands weekly, sometimes daily, updates. "Alan's style is pretty relentless," says chief financial officer Lewis Booth, a 31-year Ford veteran. "He says, 'If this is the reality, what are we going to do about it?' not 'We're going to work our way through it.'"
The Mulally method has pointed Ford to some smart strategic moves. Sensing a recession in 2006, Mulally decided to borrow $23.6 billion against Ford's assets. Piling on more debt wasn't an easy call, but the extra cash meant that Ford could say no to government loans when sales fell apart last year. Mulally is moving to integrate the company globally, despite several failed attempts in the past. In 2010, Ford will be selling small cars in the U.S. that were developed in Europe. Mulally persuaded Bill Ford to dispose of Jaguar and Land Rover and focus its resources on the Ford brand, and by moving quickly he managed to sell them to India's Tata in 2007 when there was still a market for makers of luxury vehicles. He took longer to untangle Volvo from the rest of the company, but he has now put that up for sale too.
Those moves have helped Ford separate from GM and Chrysler, and Mulally is pumped. "As we come through this, we're going to be a turbo machine on the other side," he says. He has promised that Ford's core North American operations, as well as the entire company, will turn profitable by 2011. It had better, because it can't keep losing money indefinitely. Ford recorded a loss of $14.7 billion last year and another $1.4 billion in 2009's first quarter. If the U.S. and the rest of the global economy continue to slump, Ford's survival could be endangered. "The test of Ford's liquidity will be how low vehicle sales go this year, when they recover, and what levels they recover to in 2010 and 2011," writes analyst Shelly Lombard of Gimme Credit.
Besides, Ford hasn't always handled prosperity well. It boomed in the mid-1980s on the strength of the Taurus, pickup trucks, and Lincolns, only to be laid low by the recession of 1990-91. Then it squeezed record profits out of Expeditions, Lincoln Navigators, and pickups - all built on the same platform - in the middle to late 1990s. But a binge of overseas acquisitions, combined with laxity in operations, brought it limping into the 21st century. When Mulally arrived in September 2006, Ford was known mainly for its pickup trucks and the Mustang, and the company was on the verge of collapse. It lost $12.6 billion in 2006 and another $2.7 billion in 2007.
Now, if the economy recovers on schedule, Ford is in a position to thrive. To meet stricter government fuel-economy standards, it is introducing a line of more efficient, smaller-displacement engines with turbocharging, and it will start rolling out electric vehicles in 2010. A healthier Ford will be able to scoop up business from GM and Chrysler as those companies shed brands and models. Goldman Sachs's Patrick Archambault sees Ford picking up 25% of the sales the two companies lose, equivalent to 1.35 points of market share.
So how does an industry outsider like Mulally come into a company as large as Ford - with its 205,000 employees, multiple product lines, and international operations - and straighten it out?
To people like me who follow the industry and find its inner workings infinitely complex, the success of a non-auto person is surprising and, frankly, a little discomfiting. Mulally, after all, was so removed from Detroit ways when Ford hired him that his personal car was a Lexus.
Although there are similarities between building airplanes and making cars - heavy R&D, complex manufacturing, supplier relations, a unionized workforce - there are crucial differences too. Mulally had no experience in mass marketing or dealer relations. Although he has weighed in on model names, brand streamlining (he is allowing Mercury to wither away), and product complexity (he was flabbergasted to hear that engineers had created 132 different center consoles for the Navigator), he leaves product decisions to the professionals.
The story of how Mulally revived Ford's best-known sedan is a quintessential demonstration of the Mulally method - analyzing a situation using accepted facts and then winning over support through persistence. Here's the story, told by Mulally:
"I arrive here, and the first day I say, 'Let's go look at the product lineup.' And they lay it out, and I said, 'Where's the Taurus?' They said, 'Well, we killed it.' I said, 'What do you mean, you killed it?' 'Well, we made a couple that looked like a football. They didn't sell very well, so we stopped it.' 'You stopped the Taurus?' I said. 'How many billions of dollars does it cost to build brand loyalty around a name?' 'Well, we thought it was so damaged that we named it the Five Hundred.' I said, 'Well, you've got until tomorrow to find a vehicle to put the Taurus name on because that's why I'm here. Then you have two years to make the coolest vehicle that you can possibly make.'?" The 2010 Taurus is arriving on the market this spring, and while it is not as startling as the original 1986 Taurus, it is still pretty cool.
A new corporate culture
It's difficult to imagine the reaction of hard-bitten Ford executives to Mulally's arrival. Sharp elbows, fierce loyalties, and frequent turf battles were hallmarks of Ford's management culture: The tough guys won. Despite nearly 40 years in the commercial airplane business - one of the most international of industries - Mulally looks as if he had just left his home state of Kansas. He dresses like a Boy Scout leader - blue blazer, button-down shirt, kiltie loafers - and his open-mouth smile makes him appear bemused or even a bit puzzled by what goes on around him. That corn-fed sincerity, however, masks confidence, discipline, and a fierce desire to win.
"Communicate, communicate, communicate," Mulally explained in one of his notes to me. "Everyone has to know the plan, its status, and areas that need special attention." For instance, Mulally is determined that Ford reduce its dependence on light trucks as gas becomes more expensive, and he has let the entire organization know it in the bluntest possible language. "Everybody says you can't make money off small cars," he says. "Well, you'd better damn well figure out how to make money, because that's where the world is going."
Mulally's openness seems to have won him support throughout the organization. Says manufacturing boss Joe Hinrichs: "Alan brings infectious energy. This is a person people want to follow." Sometimes Mulally verges on guilelessness. In preparation for our interview, he provided me with a one-page summary of his managerial abilities. Titled "Alan's Leadership," it includes some boilerplate - "proven successful leader ... business acumen and judgment ... steady ... true North" - but leavens it with less quantifiable traits: "expects the very best of himself and others, seeks to understand rather than to be understood." I can't imagine another CEO making such a list public. Bill Ford sums Mulally up this way: "Alan is not a very complicated person. He is very driven."
Arriving at Ford, Mulally boned up on the company like a student cramming for an exam, interviewing dozens of employees, analysts, and consultants, and filling those five binders with his typed notes. The research allowed him to develop a point of view about the auto business that now frames all his decisions. Its pillars draw heavily from his experience at Boeing: Focus on the Ford brand ("nobody buys a house of brands"); compete in every market segment with carefully defined products (small, medium, and large; cars, utilities, and trucks); market fewer nameplates (40 worldwide by 2013, down from 97 worldwide in 2006); and become best in class in quality, fuel efficiency, safety, and value.
Are corporate mission statements so 1990s? Not to Mulally. To let everyone know what he had in mind, Mulally created those plastic cards with four goals on one side ("Expected Behaviors") and a revised definition of the company ("One Ford") on the other. To Mulally, it is like sacred text: "This is me. I wrote it. It's what I believe in. You can't make this shit up."
"I am here to save an American and global icon," Mulally declares. He drives performance the way he did at Boeing, with the Business Plan Review, a meeting with his direct reports, held early every Thursday. "I live for Thursday morning at 8 a.m.," he says. First up are Ford's four profit centers: the Americas, Europe, Asia Pacific, and Ford Credit. Then come presentations from 12 functional areas (from product development and manufacturing to human resources and government relations).
"When I arrived there were six or seven people reporting to Bill Ford, and the IT person wasn't there, the human resources person wasn't there," says Mulally. "So I moved up and included every functional discipline on my team because everybody in this place had to be involved and had to know everything."
The Thursday meetings are held in what's known as the Thunderbird Room, one floor below Mulally's office, around a circular dark-wood table fitted with three pairs of videoscreens in the center. Eight clocks, one for each Ford time zone, are mounted on the wall. There are seats for 18 executives around the table, with additional ones on the perimeter ("Here's where I sit," says Mulally, indicating a chair: "Pilot's seat").
There are no pre-meetings or briefing books. "They don't bring their big books anymore because I'm not going to grind them with as many questions as I can to humiliate them," Mulally says. "We'll see them next week. We don't take action - I'm going to see you next week." No BlackBerrys are allowed, and no side conversations either - Mulally is insistent about that. "If somebody starts to talk or they don't respect each other, the meeting just stops. They know I've removed vice presidents because they couldn't stop talking because they thought they were so damn important."
Mulally instituted color coding for reports: green for good, yellow for caution, red for problems. Managers coded their operations green at the first couple of meetings to show how well they were doing, but Mulally called them on it. "You guys, you know we lost a few billion dollars last year," he told the group. "Is there anything that's not going well?" After that the process loosened up. Americas boss Mark Fields went first. He admitted that the Ford Edge, due to arrive at dealers, had some technical problems with the rear lift gate and wasn't ready for the start of production. "The whole place was deathly silent," says Mulally. "Then I clapped, and I said, 'Mark, I really appreciate that clear visibility.' And the next week the entire set of charts were all rainbows."
"If something is off-track, we are much better at identifying it and resolving it," says CFO Booth. "Not everything turns to green. If it doesn't, we have to modify the plan."
To monitor operations during the week, Mulally can visit two adjacent rooms whose walls are lined with 280 performance charts, arranged by area of responsibility, with a big picture of the executive in charge in case there are any doubts. Everyone at the Thursday meeting gets wall space. Mulally spends 30 minutes explaining the charts to me, making sure I stand 20 feet away so that I can't see any of the data. The message, though, comes through clearly: Mulally has his finger on every piece of this large and complex company. So does his board of directors; they see a subset of the same data. There are no secrets at Ford anymore. "This is a huge enterprise, and the magic is, everybody knows the plan," says Mulally.
And everyone seems to be onboard. Chief financial officer Don Leclair became a company hero for arranging the $23.6 billion loan in 2006. But other executives found him hard to work with, and Leclair decided to retire. Mulally doesn't want to have to settle arguments between executives, either. "They can either work together or they can come see me," he says. He demonstrates how infrequently that happens by springing up from his chair, dashing into his outer office, and then racing back and sitting down. He reports that nobody is waiting to see him. "They're not here. There's nobody here. There's nobody outside. So they must be working together." I am speechless, but I get the point.
Will it work?
So far, Mulally has been mostly managing the hand dealt him when he arrived. The first new model to bear his fingerprints will be the restyled 2010 Taurus that goes on sale in June. His plan for "One Ford" won't get a real test until next year when two small, fuel-efficient cars, the Fiesta and the Focus, make their way from Europe to the U.S. It remains an open question whether Americans will be willing to pay more for the smaller, higher-content vehicles. They will have to if Mulally is to succeed in reducing Ford's dependence on pickup truck profits.
The biggest unanswered questions about Mulally are how long he will stay at Ford and who will succeed him. Bill Ford has been saying that he hopes Mulally never leaves, but having spent nearly four decades in Seattle, he isn't likely to settle in Dearborn, and in fact, the company spent $344,109 in 2008 flying Mulally and his family between the two cities and elsewhere. Now that Ford is running more smoothly, there shouldn't be a need to look outside again for his successor. If Mulally leaves when he turns 65, the betting is that he will be succeeded by Booth, who is 60. If Mulally stays longer, then 48-year-old Fields would likely be the choice.
Mulally talks as if he has found a home and is doing the work he was always intended to do. "Something about just being mature, being almost 64, is that I've been there. I've been through a lot of cycles. I'm not up and down. I'm rock-solid, no matter where the bad news comes from. I'm steady. And everybody knows why I'm here. It's not a career move. I'm not trying to get ahead. I am not looking for more awards."
At one of his early meetings with employees upon joining Ford in 2006, Mulally was asked whether Ford would be able to remain in business: "Was Ford going to make it?" "I don't know," Mulally replied. "But we have a plan, and the plan says we are going to make it." It was a moment Mulally's mother would have appreciated.
Thursday, May 14, 2009
House Dems reach 'cash-for-clunkers' deal
Gordon Trowbridge / Detroit News Washington Bureau
Washington -- House Democrats have reached an agreement on a "cash-for-clunkers" bill that could perk up anemic auto sales.
The agreement ends lengthy negotiations between auto-state lawmakers, who sought a bill that would give a maximum boost to sales, and other Democrats who wanted the bill to maximize improvements in the fuel efficiency of autos on the road.
Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee discussed the legislation with President Barack Obama during a morning meeting at the White House, press secretary Robert Gibbs said. Gibbs said Obama, who has called for passage of a "cash-for-clunkers" bill, congratulated the lawmakers on crafting legislation that could help the environment and the ailing auto industry.
The idea is to offer consumers cash incentives to turn in older vehicles for new models. Rep. John Dingell said in a written statement that the deal would limit the incentives to buyers trading in cars that got 18 mpg or less, with an escalating cash reward depending on mileage of the new vehicle.
There would be similar but lower mileage requirements for drivers of pickups and SUVs and large light-duty trucks. Heavy-duty work trucks would be eligible for trade-in incentives if they were built in 2001 or earlier.
gtrowbridge@detnews.com
Washington -- House Democrats have reached an agreement on a "cash-for-clunkers" bill that could perk up anemic auto sales.
The agreement ends lengthy negotiations between auto-state lawmakers, who sought a bill that would give a maximum boost to sales, and other Democrats who wanted the bill to maximize improvements in the fuel efficiency of autos on the road.
Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee discussed the legislation with President Barack Obama during a morning meeting at the White House, press secretary Robert Gibbs said. Gibbs said Obama, who has called for passage of a "cash-for-clunkers" bill, congratulated the lawmakers on crafting legislation that could help the environment and the ailing auto industry.
The idea is to offer consumers cash incentives to turn in older vehicles for new models. Rep. John Dingell said in a written statement that the deal would limit the incentives to buyers trading in cars that got 18 mpg or less, with an escalating cash reward depending on mileage of the new vehicle.
There would be similar but lower mileage requirements for drivers of pickups and SUVs and large light-duty trucks. Heavy-duty work trucks would be eligible for trade-in incentives if they were built in 2001 or earlier.
gtrowbridge@detnews.com
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
Ford’s foresight puts carmaker in pole position
As Chrysler makes its way through bankruptcy court and General Motors tries to avoid the same fate, Ford is
emerging as the strongest of the “Big Three” automakers.
Ford has taken no federal bailout money, but it’s pulling ahead of its rivals because of well-timed financial planning
and a focused and attractive mix of product. The automaker also is profiting from the troubles at GM and Chrysler.
“[Ford’s Chief Executive Alan] Mulally went out and got credit when it was available, and he has positioned the
automaker with a global strategy using the Fiesta and the Focus,” said George Magliano, director of automotive
industry research at IHS Global Insight. “So they have gone way up the ladder, and of course they look a lot better
because they didn’t ask for a bailout.”
Ford is pushing ahead with its plan to build small compact modern cars for the U.S. market.
On Wednesday the automaker said it will invest $550 million to convert its old Michigan Truck Plant into a facility that
will build its next-generation Focus, which expected to roll off the line next year. The plant will also make a new
battery-electric version of the Focus for the North American market. That vehicle is expected to debut in 2011.
The move could help sustain Ford’s sales momentum. North American auto sales remain dismal, but Ford added
market share in April, thanks to record sales of its fuel-efficient midsize Fusion. And with Chrysler in bankruptcy and
likely to see sales continue to plummet, Ford will continue to gain, analysts say.
Ford sales were down 32 percent from a year earlier, but that was good enough to push past Toyota to reclaim its
position as the nation’s No. 2 car company, with 16 percent of the market. GM, the largest automaker with 21 percent
of the market, saw sales drop 34 percent. Chrysler, which filed for a government-engineered bankruptcy Thursday,
reported the sharpest decline among major automakers, falling 48 percent.
Key to Ford’s success is its strong cash position. Two years ago, having just arrived in Detroit from Boeing and
profiting from a stronger credit market, Ford’s Chief Executive Alan Mulally mortgaged every conceivable asset owned
by the automaker — including the iconic blue oval Ford logo — to the tune of $23 billion to finance its turnaround
plan.
Today, Ford has around $30 billion on hand, enough to finance its day-to-day operating needs until sometime in 2010,
when the auto market is expected to pick up again, according to analysts.
Ford also has managed its product mix effectively, notes Tom Appel, associate publisher of Consumer Guide
Automotive, a guide for car buyers. In mid-2008, when the price of gasoline topped $4 a gallon for the first time, Ford
was best-placed out of all the big U.S. automakers to “roll into the recession” and handle the sharp rise in gas prices,
he said.
While Chrysler had developed a suite of compact and midsize cars, including the Dodge Avenger and the Jeep
Compass, that all looked similar and unrefined, and were not especially fuel-efficient, Ford and GM were producing
stronger vehicles in these categories, Appel said.
Ford’s Fusion and Mercury Milan, in particular, were perfect for when the recession hit and car-buyers “got
conservative,” he said. Dodge’s midsize Avenger sold 1,400 units in April, but the Ford Fusion sold 18,000 units, Appel
added. Ford also managed to work nice new interiors into the vehicles, and they have benefited from good press
surrounding the introduction of the Ford Fusion hybrid.
“Ford didn’t spend a lot of money on the Focus; they didn’t redesign it, so when $4 gas came they had this vehicle
ready, and so they could sell it cheaply when people started looking for cheaper transportation,” he said.
Chrysler in particular missed the mark on vehicle introductions, bringing out the redesigned Dodge Ram pickup truck
and updated minivans just when the auto-buyer market was shifting to smaller vehicles.
“The Dodge Ram is an outstanding vehicle, but the market is not good for trucks right now,” Appel said. “They might
have the best pickup ever made, but this is not the time to get the word out on it.”
MSNBC.com
The Obama administration has said it will backstop Chrysler warranties even with the automaker in bankruptcy, and
has promised to extend the same protection to GM customers.
But a recent survey by research firm TNS Automotive shows 20 percent of customers are less likely to buy cars from
an automaker that is operating with government help. That figure rises to 37 percent when bankruptcy is introduced,
according to report on the findings by IHS Global Insight. Only 12 percent say they would support a car receiving
government aid, with that number falling to 8 percent if the company files for bankruptcy, according to the report.
IHS Global Insight’s Magliano says Chrysler is likely to lose 40 to 60 percent of its sales volume in bankruptcy, and
something similar could happen to GM if it is forced into bankruptcy protection. What’s more, Chrysler is cutting plants
and scaling back production, which also will weigh on sales, he added.
“Despite the government guarantees for when you buy a car or a truck from these guys, this is a serious issue for the
automakers,” Magliano said. “These sales will be lost and spread throughout the industry, and so we think Ford could
see their sales volume increase by 30 or 40 percent because there are people out there predisposed to buy an
American brand. That’s a significant amount of value for them.”
However, Ford isn’t out of the woods yet, notes Magliano. They’ve had luck getting money to survive on, but they still
have too many plants and too many dealers, and also too many dealers in a shrinking and increasingly fragmented
industry.
“And they’re counting on a significant recovery in sales at the end of this year, expecting annual sales to come in at
the 12 million range, but we are looking at something more like 9.5 million or 10.5 million,” he said. “So there could
be significant pressure on them at the end of this year; pressure they haven’t been counting on.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30576127/
emerging as the strongest of the “Big Three” automakers.
Ford has taken no federal bailout money, but it’s pulling ahead of its rivals because of well-timed financial planning
and a focused and attractive mix of product. The automaker also is profiting from the troubles at GM and Chrysler.
“[Ford’s Chief Executive Alan] Mulally went out and got credit when it was available, and he has positioned the
automaker with a global strategy using the Fiesta and the Focus,” said George Magliano, director of automotive
industry research at IHS Global Insight. “So they have gone way up the ladder, and of course they look a lot better
because they didn’t ask for a bailout.”
Ford is pushing ahead with its plan to build small compact modern cars for the U.S. market.
On Wednesday the automaker said it will invest $550 million to convert its old Michigan Truck Plant into a facility that
will build its next-generation Focus, which expected to roll off the line next year. The plant will also make a new
battery-electric version of the Focus for the North American market. That vehicle is expected to debut in 2011.
The move could help sustain Ford’s sales momentum. North American auto sales remain dismal, but Ford added
market share in April, thanks to record sales of its fuel-efficient midsize Fusion. And with Chrysler in bankruptcy and
likely to see sales continue to plummet, Ford will continue to gain, analysts say.
Ford sales were down 32 percent from a year earlier, but that was good enough to push past Toyota to reclaim its
position as the nation’s No. 2 car company, with 16 percent of the market. GM, the largest automaker with 21 percent
of the market, saw sales drop 34 percent. Chrysler, which filed for a government-engineered bankruptcy Thursday,
reported the sharpest decline among major automakers, falling 48 percent.
Key to Ford’s success is its strong cash position. Two years ago, having just arrived in Detroit from Boeing and
profiting from a stronger credit market, Ford’s Chief Executive Alan Mulally mortgaged every conceivable asset owned
by the automaker — including the iconic blue oval Ford logo — to the tune of $23 billion to finance its turnaround
plan.
Today, Ford has around $30 billion on hand, enough to finance its day-to-day operating needs until sometime in 2010,
when the auto market is expected to pick up again, according to analysts.
Ford also has managed its product mix effectively, notes Tom Appel, associate publisher of Consumer Guide
Automotive, a guide for car buyers. In mid-2008, when the price of gasoline topped $4 a gallon for the first time, Ford
was best-placed out of all the big U.S. automakers to “roll into the recession” and handle the sharp rise in gas prices,
he said.
While Chrysler had developed a suite of compact and midsize cars, including the Dodge Avenger and the Jeep
Compass, that all looked similar and unrefined, and were not especially fuel-efficient, Ford and GM were producing
stronger vehicles in these categories, Appel said.
Ford’s Fusion and Mercury Milan, in particular, were perfect for when the recession hit and car-buyers “got
conservative,” he said. Dodge’s midsize Avenger sold 1,400 units in April, but the Ford Fusion sold 18,000 units, Appel
added. Ford also managed to work nice new interiors into the vehicles, and they have benefited from good press
surrounding the introduction of the Ford Fusion hybrid.
“Ford didn’t spend a lot of money on the Focus; they didn’t redesign it, so when $4 gas came they had this vehicle
ready, and so they could sell it cheaply when people started looking for cheaper transportation,” he said.
Chrysler in particular missed the mark on vehicle introductions, bringing out the redesigned Dodge Ram pickup truck
and updated minivans just when the auto-buyer market was shifting to smaller vehicles.
“The Dodge Ram is an outstanding vehicle, but the market is not good for trucks right now,” Appel said. “They might
have the best pickup ever made, but this is not the time to get the word out on it.”
MSNBC.com
The Obama administration has said it will backstop Chrysler warranties even with the automaker in bankruptcy, and
has promised to extend the same protection to GM customers.
But a recent survey by research firm TNS Automotive shows 20 percent of customers are less likely to buy cars from
an automaker that is operating with government help. That figure rises to 37 percent when bankruptcy is introduced,
according to report on the findings by IHS Global Insight. Only 12 percent say they would support a car receiving
government aid, with that number falling to 8 percent if the company files for bankruptcy, according to the report.
IHS Global Insight’s Magliano says Chrysler is likely to lose 40 to 60 percent of its sales volume in bankruptcy, and
something similar could happen to GM if it is forced into bankruptcy protection. What’s more, Chrysler is cutting plants
and scaling back production, which also will weigh on sales, he added.
“Despite the government guarantees for when you buy a car or a truck from these guys, this is a serious issue for the
automakers,” Magliano said. “These sales will be lost and spread throughout the industry, and so we think Ford could
see their sales volume increase by 30 or 40 percent because there are people out there predisposed to buy an
American brand. That’s a significant amount of value for them.”
However, Ford isn’t out of the woods yet, notes Magliano. They’ve had luck getting money to survive on, but they still
have too many plants and too many dealers, and also too many dealers in a shrinking and increasingly fragmented
industry.
“And they’re counting on a significant recovery in sales at the end of this year, expecting annual sales to come in at
the 12 million range, but we are looking at something more like 9.5 million or 10.5 million,” he said. “So there could
be significant pressure on them at the end of this year; pressure they haven’t been counting on.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30576127/
Monday, May 4, 2009
Auto Sales Remain in a Rut; Ford Overtakes Toyota
By JOHN KELL and SHARON TERLEP
U.S. vehicle sales remained in a deep rut last month, damping hopes that the auto sector would begin to see some relief despite the
recession. Ford Motor Co., the healthiest of Detroit's auto makers, scored a small victory, outselling Toyota Motor Co. for the first time in at least a
year as the Japanese auto maker's sales fell even more preciptiously than those of its U.S. rival.
Toyota saw a 42% decline in April, while Ford's U.S. sales fell 32%. General Motors Corp., the top seller in the U.S., reported a 33% drop. Overall, the annual selling rate remained stuck in the neighborhood of nine million vehicles, likely falling below 850,000 car and truck sales, according to early auto maker estimates. The drop represents a decline of 35% to 40% from a year ago. "Industrywide, April felt more like a dust bowl than a spring garden for new car sales," said Jim O'Donnell, president of BMW in North America, in a statement.
Uncertainty around GM and Chrysler LLC, which entered bankruptcy protection on Thursday, weighed on sales the month's end and erased
a strong start to the month, auto makers said. Chrysler finished with a 48% decline for April.
"I thought we were going to close much better than we did," GM sales Chief Mark LaNeve said. "We didn't see a significant break up or
down."
Shaky consumer confidence and high levels of joblessness offset benefits of increased credit availability, deep discounts on cars and trucks
and U.S. government backing of warranties on GM and Chrysler vehicles.
"We continue to operate in a very challenging economic and competitive environment," said Ken Czubay, Ford vice president of sales and
marketing.
While auto makers said they see signs of an impending rebound, more turmoil lies ahead this spring as GM and Chrysler race to remake
themselves under close watch of the U.S. government.
GM said it sold 172,150 vehicles in the U.S. in April, down from 257,638 a year earlier. Its car sales fell 41%, while sales of light trucks –
which include sport utility vehicles, vans and pickups – fell 27%. On the bright side, the auto maker said its volumes were up significantly
from March.
Ford sold 133,979 light vehicles, down from 195,665 a year earlier. But the company, which outsold Toyota in the U.S. for the first time
since March 2008, said it is gaining market share.
Ford, Lincoln and Mercury car sales dropped 31% despite record sales of the Fusion sedan. Sport-utility vehicles continued to tumble,
falling 61% in April. Sales of pickups and vans dropped 36%.
Toyota sold 126,540 vehicles in the U.S., as car and light-truck sales fell by a similar margin.
At Chrysler, April sales dropped to 76,682 vehicles, the lowest total since January and putting its year-to-date figure below Honda Motor
Co. The Japanese auto maker's U.S. sales fell 25% to 101,029 last month.
Still, Chrysler executives sounded a hopeful note as it prepares to restructure itself in alliance with Italy's Fiat.
"The industry appears to have stabilized, as it's been fairly level for the past four months," said President Jim Press. "We know where the
bottom is, and as the economy struggles to recover, vehicle sales should follow."
Also Friday, Nissan Motor Co. said its U.S. sales fell 38% to 47,190 vehicles. Hyundai Motor Co. reported its April sales dropped 14% to
33,952, while Daimler AG's U.S. sales fell 31% to 15,910.
U.S. vehicle sales remained in a deep rut last month, damping hopes that the auto sector would begin to see some relief despite the
recession. Ford Motor Co., the healthiest of Detroit's auto makers, scored a small victory, outselling Toyota Motor Co. for the first time in at least a
year as the Japanese auto maker's sales fell even more preciptiously than those of its U.S. rival.
Toyota saw a 42% decline in April, while Ford's U.S. sales fell 32%. General Motors Corp., the top seller in the U.S., reported a 33% drop. Overall, the annual selling rate remained stuck in the neighborhood of nine million vehicles, likely falling below 850,000 car and truck sales, according to early auto maker estimates. The drop represents a decline of 35% to 40% from a year ago. "Industrywide, April felt more like a dust bowl than a spring garden for new car sales," said Jim O'Donnell, president of BMW in North America, in a statement.
Uncertainty around GM and Chrysler LLC, which entered bankruptcy protection on Thursday, weighed on sales the month's end and erased
a strong start to the month, auto makers said. Chrysler finished with a 48% decline for April.
"I thought we were going to close much better than we did," GM sales Chief Mark LaNeve said. "We didn't see a significant break up or
down."
Shaky consumer confidence and high levels of joblessness offset benefits of increased credit availability, deep discounts on cars and trucks
and U.S. government backing of warranties on GM and Chrysler vehicles.
"We continue to operate in a very challenging economic and competitive environment," said Ken Czubay, Ford vice president of sales and
marketing.
While auto makers said they see signs of an impending rebound, more turmoil lies ahead this spring as GM and Chrysler race to remake
themselves under close watch of the U.S. government.
GM said it sold 172,150 vehicles in the U.S. in April, down from 257,638 a year earlier. Its car sales fell 41%, while sales of light trucks –
which include sport utility vehicles, vans and pickups – fell 27%. On the bright side, the auto maker said its volumes were up significantly
from March.
Ford sold 133,979 light vehicles, down from 195,665 a year earlier. But the company, which outsold Toyota in the U.S. for the first time
since March 2008, said it is gaining market share.
Ford, Lincoln and Mercury car sales dropped 31% despite record sales of the Fusion sedan. Sport-utility vehicles continued to tumble,
falling 61% in April. Sales of pickups and vans dropped 36%.
Toyota sold 126,540 vehicles in the U.S., as car and light-truck sales fell by a similar margin.
At Chrysler, April sales dropped to 76,682 vehicles, the lowest total since January and putting its year-to-date figure below Honda Motor
Co. The Japanese auto maker's U.S. sales fell 25% to 101,029 last month.
Still, Chrysler executives sounded a hopeful note as it prepares to restructure itself in alliance with Italy's Fiat.
"The industry appears to have stabilized, as it's been fairly level for the past four months," said President Jim Press. "We know where the
bottom is, and as the economy struggles to recover, vehicle sales should follow."
Also Friday, Nissan Motor Co. said its U.S. sales fell 38% to 47,190 vehicles. Hyundai Motor Co. reported its April sales dropped 14% to
33,952, while Daimler AG's U.S. sales fell 31% to 15,910.
Friday, May 1, 2009
2010 Ford Fusion and Ford Fusion Hybrid Earn Top Safety Ratings
The new 2010 Ford Fusion and Fusion Hybrid are rated as the most fuel efficient midsize cars in North America, along with another top rating for safety. That makes Ford the only U. S. automaker to earn both best-in-class ratings for one model.
And it's not just one -- the Ford Escape SUV earned the same double rating in 2008. The "Top Safety Pick" rating is from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.
The Fusion Hybrid offers 41 mpg city, while the Escape Hybrid is simply the most fuel-efficient SUV on the planet. Ford Motor Company also has more IIHS "Top Safety Picks" than any other automaker, import or domestic.
The new Fusion Hybrid's class-leading fuel economy bests the Toyota Camry hybrid by at 8 mpg in the city. The new car also features Ford's innovative EcoGuide, which coaches drivers to maximize fuel efficiency by giving you instant feedback, guiding you to smoother accelerating and braking, both of which save gas.
In addition, the new Fusion and sibling Mercury Milan offer three fuel-sipping gas engine options, a 2.5-liter, an enhanced 3.0-liter V-6, and a 3.5-liter V-6. Fusions equipped with the smallest of the three choices are expected to deliver at least 3 mpg better on the highway than the Honda Accord, and 2 mpg better than the Toyota Camry.
Because the 2010 Ford Fusion and Fusion Hybrid are so eco-friendly, you may qualify for a $3,400 tax credit. This is good.
So, yes, there is some good news from Detroit.
You can find more articles about green cars, hybrid cars and electric cars by Evelyn Kanter on Examiner.com
And it's not just one -- the Ford Escape SUV earned the same double rating in 2008. The "Top Safety Pick" rating is from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.
The Fusion Hybrid offers 41 mpg city, while the Escape Hybrid is simply the most fuel-efficient SUV on the planet. Ford Motor Company also has more IIHS "Top Safety Picks" than any other automaker, import or domestic.
The new Fusion Hybrid's class-leading fuel economy bests the Toyota Camry hybrid by at 8 mpg in the city. The new car also features Ford's innovative EcoGuide, which coaches drivers to maximize fuel efficiency by giving you instant feedback, guiding you to smoother accelerating and braking, both of which save gas.
In addition, the new Fusion and sibling Mercury Milan offer three fuel-sipping gas engine options, a 2.5-liter, an enhanced 3.0-liter V-6, and a 3.5-liter V-6. Fusions equipped with the smallest of the three choices are expected to deliver at least 3 mpg better on the highway than the Honda Accord, and 2 mpg better than the Toyota Camry.
Because the 2010 Ford Fusion and Fusion Hybrid are so eco-friendly, you may qualify for a $3,400 tax credit. This is good.
So, yes, there is some good news from Detroit.
You can find more articles about green cars, hybrid cars and electric cars by Evelyn Kanter on Examiner.com
Ford Fusion driver isn't buffaloed
We promise we're not on a Fusion roll, but a press release from Ford today stood out. Open Road doesn't often get pitches that come with a photo of a Montana customer's wrecked car (above). The headline: Driver survives high-speed Yellowstone bison crash. (The English teachers among you may wonder why someone was driving a bison. And who knew bison had a high-performance model? But read on.)
Said Ford: "Maureen Edgerton, 51, of West Yellowstone, Mt., was driving home on the dark night of April 11, when she unexpectedly slammed her 2007 Ford Fusion into a herd of bison. The 55-mile-per-hour impact totaled the car and killed several of the migrating 'American buffalo' on the snowbound highway. Edgerton, however, walked away with only minor scrapes and bruises."
Edgerton, who plans to buy another Fusion, was more colorful: "The crash was like a war scene."
A deer on the highway is dangerous; how about a herd of animals the size of three refrigerators and weighing a ton or more? Now the photo doesn't look so bad.
We bet Ford's lawyers wrote the entertaining disclaimer to the tale: "While Ford Motor Company does not have specific requirements to protect customers in collisions with bison or other animals, all of the company’s vehicles are designed and tested to meet rigorous crash safety requirements."
Said Ford: "Maureen Edgerton, 51, of West Yellowstone, Mt., was driving home on the dark night of April 11, when she unexpectedly slammed her 2007 Ford Fusion into a herd of bison. The 55-mile-per-hour impact totaled the car and killed several of the migrating 'American buffalo' on the snowbound highway. Edgerton, however, walked away with only minor scrapes and bruises."
Edgerton, who plans to buy another Fusion, was more colorful: "The crash was like a war scene."
A deer on the highway is dangerous; how about a herd of animals the size of three refrigerators and weighing a ton or more? Now the photo doesn't look so bad.
We bet Ford's lawyers wrote the entertaining disclaimer to the tale: "While Ford Motor Company does not have specific requirements to protect customers in collisions with bison or other animals, all of the company’s vehicles are designed and tested to meet rigorous crash safety requirements."
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