enthalpy

Sunday, January 07, 2007


In a desperate attempt to stay out of Chapter 11, Ford puts a new shine on two of its old turds.
The challenge from Ford Motor Co.'s top brass was daunting: Take an old car and a bland one and make them better. Don't change their basic frames and footprints, but make them look and feel new. And by the way, the future of the company is at stake, because if they don't sell, the automaker could run out of money.

That's what Ford designers and engineers faced when they set out to update the aging Focus small car and the slow-selling Five Hundred full-sized sedan.

The company will unveil new versions of both models this week at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit. A lot is riding on them when they hit the showrooms later this year as 2008 models, especially if consumers continue to shift from trucks and sport utility vehicles to cars.
It'll be a sad day when Ford becomes the 21st century's buggy whip manufacturer, but I can't muster a tear for a company of that size that brought it upon itself. I've owned two Fords in the past decade, and it was obvious they didn't care about their car market when SUVs were making 100% profit. So now that high gas prices are driving the market back towards economy, they're finding out the hard way they people don't want to buy a Ford car now anymore than Ford wanted to sell them one five years ago when their SUV sales were a license to print money. So I can be sad at the decline and death of an American institution, but not so much when it's a result of their own hauteur and greed.



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