Does it matter to any of the breast-beaters in this thread, entitled "Future of FORD," that Ford Motor Company is NOT asking the U.S. for a loan? In fact Ford -- William Ford that is -- has been drinking the Greenist Kool Aid for quite awhile now -- at the same time as his family's company has depended on 1,000,000 F-series sales per year to stay afloat and able to support those fat UAW pay packages and work rules and pensions.
One of the scary things about President Elect Obama -- and it's a long list -- is when he utters such nonsense as his demand that Detroit present the Government with a plan for a "sustainable" industry. What, 100+ years in business is not sustainability? More to the point, the scary part is what has come to be the received wisdom on Capitol Hill and the Mainstream Media: that Detroit's problems began when it let the marketplace drive its product planning, and chose not to walk away from lucrative SUV and pickup sales in order to design and build a lot of hybrids and other fuel efficient vehicles.
Prius annual sales have never exceeded 200,000. They had leveled off at 170,000 units in 2007, and Toyota was having to resort to financing deals and discounts to move the inventory. Only when oil shot up to $150/barrel earlier this year did sales take off again, such that
180,000 units had been sold by September or October. (We can expect sales to cool off again now that oil prices have come back down to earth.) The point being, that even if Chevy or Dodge or Ford had been selling a Prius clone for the past several years -- i.e., a vehicle substantially identical to the Prius in every way, including with respect to the irrational perceptions of the Greenist community -- the best they could have hoped for is a slice of that 170,000-200,000 units/year pie. The availability of additional brands in this tiny segment would NOT have substantially increased the size of the pie. And that pie is about 800,000 units short of what Ford needs from the disdained F-series products to break even (and to continue to support all those Democrat-friendly UAW rank-and-filers in the style to which they have become accustomed).How can the Democrats and The Chosen One presume to dictate product decisions to Detroit when they are so totally ignorant of these simple truths? Of course, they can't. But they think they can. This fool Obama thinks he and his Harvard and Yale-educated Statists/Greenists know better than the marketplace what products Detroit should build if it wants to survive. This is what is scary, that they truly believe that they do know better.
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