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Goodbye Continental


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Not so fast....MKT Town Car is making them $$$ even at its reduced volume and if MKT Town Car goes, the loss to the "black car" market is not something I believe Aviator could fill. Aviator is aimed at a different audience for sure. Drop the MKT portion of the name and continue production as is (maybe another face lift) with just the moniker of Town Car...

 

 

They only sell a couple hundred MKT's a month in total (sometimes less than that), and a fraction of those are Town Cars which aren't high-ticket items to begin with. Once Explorer/Aviator come online and Taurus is dropped, every component in the MKT and Flex bill be orphaned without a volume product to support them which almost certainly decreases profitability. The longer you hold onto something, the less profitable it becomes. They need to get rid of it either way so they can sunset their old stuff, right now the Flex and MKT likely exist because of UNIFOR contracts.

 

Flex with a Mark Fields pet project, that product lost its only champion. They have more stuff coming anyway.

Edited by Assimilator
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That is what I think the new building in Flat Rock will also be used for.

 

 

that is because its a PITA to get one because of the shipping time. Local production makes it so much easier to sell more because dealers will be able to carry stock of more than just 1 at a time and be able to get them in a reasonable amount of time.

 

You're absolutely right. My "local' dealer in Gaylord, has one Transit Connect in stock, and that's a cargo van.

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They only sell a couple hundred MKT's a month in total (sometimes less than that), and a fraction of those are Town Cars which aren't high-ticket items to begin with. Once Explorer/Aviator come online and Taurus is dropped, every component in the MKT and Flex bill be orphaned without a volume product to support them which almost certainly decreases profitability. The longer you hold onto something, the less profitable it becomes. They need to get rid of it either way so they can sunset their old stuff, right now the Flex and MKT likely exist because of UNIFOR contracts.

 

Flex with a Mark Fields pet project, that product lost its only champion. They have more stuff coming anyway.

On the flip side, Flex and MKT (and D3/D4 in general) have been in production long enough the tooling has long been paid for.
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They may also have a facility for retrofitting products that come off the assembly plant.

 

 

The Transit Connect isn't exactly a big seller so I'm not sure if local production makes much sense but that might change with AV. It all seems like a big gamble right now.

 

It seems like Transit Connect is artificially supply-constrained because Ford lost the chicken tax dispute with US Custom. The tax evasion case is still pending I believe but the court ruled that Ford has to pay the tax in the meanwhile. Having more inventory with more options and build combos will probably expand sales quite a bit. And not having to pay 25% tariff will surely help make the bottom line pencil out much better.

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...not having to pay 25% tariff will surely help make the bottom line pencil out much better.

I wonder if FMC splits the %difference, giving customers 12% off & 12% better profit-margin

[ & 1% lost in the cracks ange003.gif ]

*IF* that would get the margin upto the holy-8%-grail?

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The interst and demand for the Transit Connect has leveled off the past few years so I don't know that there's much growth potential. The OTD (Order-to-Delivery) schedule doesn't make it easy to plan inventory so far in advance but our dealership has cut Transit Connect inventory based on sales history.

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The interst and demand for the Transit Connect has leveled off the past few years so I don't know that there's much growth potential. The OTD (Order-to-Delivery) schedule doesn't make it easy to plan inventory so far in advance but our dealership has cut Transit Connect inventory based on sales history.

 

Is that because desired models aren't available, or it's just saturated and stagnant at current levels?

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Transit Connect is also a fleet product, you won't find dealerships stocking Transits either so it's not about walk-in availability. I know they are trying to sell a "Wagon" version of them but that appears largely to be done to appease regulations which apparently didn't work.

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