Well at least he recognizes Ford has a consumer related problem. That's a good start.
Good post- you hit the nail.
GM makes the best domestic cars, always have, always will.
Ford makes some "interesting" products, just like Chrysler did- but overall, GM has the better engineers, better engines, better cars.
That's why GM has been the biggest car co. in the world- FOR DECADES.
It's pretty hard to sell new cars to people, when the old ones you sold
10-15 years ago were built so well, they are still running fine like clocks. Where's the incentive to go in debt $25grand and buy another one ?you can only drive a car so much !
Um no. And if that's the way you feel, why are you in Ford NG's?
Biggest doesn't mean best. GM makes a lot of crap and has done so FOR DECADES. It's size means that they have gotten away with it FOR DECADES.
True... Which is why it takes an interesting car at a good price to get me considering buying a new car. Another issue is the dealerships. No matter how good the new product is, just going in there is an unpleasant experience.
Exactly...GM is now paying for screwing customers since the late
1960s.To evade stupid, useless crap posts like the one you just dealt with, global kill file the following:
snipped-for-privacy@hotmail.com snipped-for-privacy@hotmail.com snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com
...and the problem will go away.
The "problem" is Charles M. Nudo, Jr. of Drums, PA...the "Jelly Jar King of Drums," as he's known by, a paranoid delusional nut case who likes to make his own reality as he goes along. This nutbag has had no less than 14 (soon to be more) Google Groups accounts shut down for spam, harassment, posting of personal information, and other miscues. There is NO reasoning with this fucktard....just kill file him. He's too stupid to use a newsreader, so he thinks that by "bumping" posts he'll remain on top of the thread list. Little does he realize that only works in Google, which no one with a brain uses.
GM itself proved this with the Saturn project. When people found out that non-commissioned sales people would be simply filling orders for new cars, Saturn took off like a Saturn rocket. However, GM, always looking to screw people, started allowing their Saturn dealers to start doing "workarounds" to the non-commissioned sales rule, tacking on huge "spiffs" onto things like finanacing, insurance and dealer "add-ons." Now, most Saturn dealers are just as bad as the rest of them, and falling Saturn sales tell the tale.
Ford, over the years, has had some of the worst dealers of all, both for sales abuse and service. "Fence jobs" in Ford service departments were the rule...take the car in, decide the customer's a dumb shit, park the car along the back fence for about a week, call the customer for pick-up, charge them $500 for transmission work, "tune up", whatever. They tried to "fence job" me on a new '70 Ford with a 3-2 part throttle downshift flare, and I caught them. Ford's zone office paid me for my trouble and made the dealer pay an independent shop for a new intermediate band servo seal job.
To be fair, I caught a Toyota dealership doing this with '70s Toyotas with B-W automatics. They'd take the cars in, tell the owner that the transmission was "shot," "fence line" it, then deliver the car in a week with not a wrench being put to it. A seal placed on the transmission pan told the tale. Toyota refused to revoke the dealer's franchise, and that was back years ago, but the state threatened to take away their license unless full refunds were paid out.
After Billy Boy Ford's mismanagement, he has a LOT of clean-up work to do, probably as much or more than Iacocca did when he started to turn Chrysler around in the '70s. Billy Boy thought that people would come in droves to buy things like F-150/250s, Expeditions and Lincoln pickups, while neglecting and not fixing problems with the Focus project, following King Henry II's dictum of "mini cars, mini profits," and banking the whole company's "car" future on the 500 project, which is turning out to be a turd, as is the Tempo-esque "Fusion." The "retro" Mustang has a limited market at best, and their callous marketing ploys (you can only get upgraded interior and appearance packages like the GT with a V8, silly in that sized car) have dampened a lot of sales.
The challenge to Mulally will be to put Ford's money where their mouth is on the fuel cell project. If they can crack that nut, the Japs, finally, will be in big trouble. It will require regime change in Washington (part of which will happen in about 10 days) and rejetion of many Ford family paradigms. The Ford family, like everyone in power at GM, is too tied to the oil industry to be useful in converting the country away from petroleum-based fuel. For a turnaround to work, the Ford family MUST be removed from company operations, once and for all time.
The Ford family will NOT try to take the company private again. They're not THAT stupid. Doing so would rather be like Cunard launching a new "Titanic II" in 1913. The running away of Billy Boy pretty much showed the family's hand...rats running from a sinking ship.
Oh...before you decide to go for that V8 Mustang or F-150 gas guzzler, oil spot market prices are back on the rise again, over $60/bbl and rising as I write this. Looks like the Saudis aren't waiting for the election!
Ford's marketing tends to turn everything they touch bad if it wasn't already a bad idea from the get go.
The problem is not using petroleum-based fuel, as there is enough oil in the americas alone to keep using gasoline. The problem is that oil isn't a free market. Huge barriers to entry from infastructure to regulation to politics allow big oil to do as they please. That's where a non-petroleum-based fuel comes into play, to turn the fuel business back to something more like a free market. Exactly what large corporations do not want. They want the market fixed in their favor as much as possible.
Actually I am not going to make my next purchase based on fuel economy. I'd rather have a car I'll enjoy and use my bicycle (which I also enjoy) to compensate for any shortage in fuel economy. Now what would have been nice is to have had something come of the super-stallion project.
Friggin troll. GM piston slappin transmission eating junk... I switched to Ford after problems with GM. Much better reliability.
WTH? I get 23mpg and 28mpg in my 03 v8 Mustang GT. that is not so bad...
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