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Showing content with the highest reputation on 04/14/2019 in all areas

  1. I picked up my new Ranger today! It is just perfect for me. Love it! Thanks again for tracking my order!
    2 points
  2. Most of this stems from automotive outsiders aka IT companies (Nvidia,Apple to a lesser point, etc) over hyping the market to pump up stock prices because their other products are mature (i.e. no way to grow market share) to keep profits up. Just take a look at Trains or even Airplanes-both would be far easier to "automate", but they still have humans in the loop. We will see full electrification before we see completely autonomous cars on the roads-they will be limited to fixed areas (think parking lots like Disney) for the next 5-10-15 years.
    2 points
  3. Probably a good spot to post this: http://www.autoextremist.com/on-the-table1/
    1 point
  4. Maybe that's why with the reorganization he was put in charge of Ford's vaperware divisions...
    1 point
  5. Here is a recent item for consideration.... https://www.diecastcompany.nl/article/mai31521
    1 point
  6. Back seat entrance and exit will be horrible (yes, I know, not much different than now, but who really sits in the back seat of a Mustang anyway?)...do not "pollute" the linage of Mustang with this attempt.....better off using recently departed Aussie Falcon body lines and four door setup, however, the marketplace has spoken...sedans are a non-starter.
    1 point
  7. As a Ford enthusiast, this angers me. You announce $4 billion in investment in July and then in April admit that you've overestimated the application? "The applications will be narrow because the problem is so complex"? Anyone with an ounce of common sense knows this. More evidence that idiots are running the company. How does Hackett survive this? They've announced billions in spending reductions to fund autonomous cars, money that is desperately needed to fund new vehicle development that would actually pay off. Oh well, what's $4 billion pissed away?
    1 point
  8. This shouldn't hurt Ford's commercial plans too much - I think it was always predicated on geo-fencing and operating in a small known area doing deliveries. As for the problem being too complex to solve immediately, I believe a lot of us here had that one from the get go.
    1 point
  9. Everybody overestimated the self-driven cars. I think will take decades to put a car without pedals/stering wheel in the market.
    1 point
  10. I think this is the biggest misconception that people have when criticizing marketing and product decisions. In most any business you have a fixed amount of capital, time and resources and you can almost never do everything you want to do in a given year. You prioritize the projects and draw a line when the resources run out. I've either lost funding or never gotten funding for lots of good projects because the business needs to divert all available funding to more important things. That's just how it works in the real world. You always have to pick and choose your opportunities and in doing so sometimes you have to make unpopular decisions.
    1 point
  11. You know, things change, markets change, people's desires change, and opinions change. I agree leaving the market means you have to start from scratch next time, but if your choices are continue spending money in a shrinking market where profits are thin, or invest your money into a market where you have definite strengths and the profits are much better, which do you do? You forget that Ford doesn't have unlimited resources to engineer and plants to build vehicles. You sometimes have to make tough choices to cut something in order to succeed. So, let's say Ford chose to cancel the Ranger in order to bring the Transit over here due to resources. Was cancelling the Ranger a bad move at that time? Sales were down and profits were nill and it was going to cost a fortune to update the T6 to bring it here. Ford saw the opening in the van market because nobody had anything else, and Ford KNOWS the fleet market. Fast forward to today. Ford makes a bunch of those vans, in a shared plant with F150, using shared powertrains and economies of scale. That was the right move at the time. It sucked to lose Ranger, but it was a necessary move to make Ford viable. Sure, Ford is a bit behind in the small truck market, but in the end, they are more than making up for it with van sales. It will take them a while to get the Ranger back to the top, but with Ford's truck dominance, I feel they will get there. And Toyota dumping the Camry or Honda the Civic is entirely different. That is their bread and butter. That's where they put their resources because that's what they know. Do they know trucks? The Tundra and Ridgeline show they don't, at least not here in the US. In the end though, if sales continue their downward spiral for cars, look for them to be cancelled. I don't think it will go that far, though, because there is a certain number of sedan buyers, and they will all migrate to the few that remain, and those will be the stalwarts, those whose bread and butter is sedans.
    1 point
  12. Definitely not As far as I know the Troller brand is a dead man walking. It's certainly not getting updated to T6.
    0 points
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