Fordlover wrote:
valhalla360 wrote:
RobertRyan wrote:
As I posted before, that heartbeat could be a slow one, as the imported vehicles could be subject too a 20% tax. Ford is also dropping sedans in Europe
If everyone is dropping sedans everywhere, the public will just have to wait a slow heartbeat as it's not just Ford that is moving away fro sedans (I believe they still have a couple of econobox options they are keeping) but I'm sure Ford is well aware and they aren't the only ones transitioning away from sedans (not cars).
Heck 30mpg 1/2ton pickups beat out your average car from 20yrs ago and crossovers can be even better, so you are going to have to do something pretty impressive to get people back into sedans.
Yep, it's called the first economic downturn (or gas price spike) after sedans are phased out. Econoboxes will start fetching higher than reasonable values because they are few and far between. Supposedly the news of sedans going away has already increased the transaction prices, I'll see if I can track down the article I read on that.
In conventional car speak, the Mustang is the only car ford is keeping. Everything else will be a quasi SUV or crossover, or Truck/SUV.
My Father has a 2014 Focus with a 5 speed manual. He routinely returns >40MPG with reasonably careful driving. It is a really decent car with leather and all comfort features, and full boat retail MSRP was 21K. My F250 was 3X that #. No wonder Ford is giving up on sedans.
Yep...a lot of it is about how much money a manufacturer
can make on an individual vehicle. Not a lot of meat on the bone on your father's Focus for a manufacturer, but significantly more to be made on a full size pickup truck.
My wife and I were out and about for a while in our medium sized city. For a little bit, till we got bored , we started counting how many cars vs SUV/CUV's vs pickup trucks we saw in traffic. Vehicles were of all ages, but in this quick, non scientific 'survey' sedans seemed to win out, but not by much.
Some ehicles were newer,a couple of years old, very few seemed to be older than 10 year old and we did our survey in what I would describe as a middle class suburb.
There are a lot of people that drive small Japanese, Korean, American sedans. Seems to fill their needs and a lot of these small sedans are the least costly of vehicle out there. I would guess some driving these small grocery getter sedans, do so because this is all they can budget for, some drive them because they just want a small, 4 door sedan...nothing more.
Ford's new CEO previously ran a furniture company I understand, so he certainly has experience running a large company.
Ford's new CEOFord seems to be embarking on a great experiment. I don't have any... big business acumen, so I don't know how things will go for FoMoCo.
It will be interesting to see how things turn out.
As always, I hope things go well for North American companies.
