Does anybody know what kind of recreational drugs the ad writers are
on?
It looks like really good stuff.

Mark

Because the Opels were in the shop more than they were on the road and
had a lousy reliability rep.  They were NOT very good cars.  How could
they be?  They were a GM product!

DING DING DING...we have a winner!  After castigating auto workers for
making a good living and other stupidity, someone's finally hit upon a
big chunk of the problem.

You've got it...in spades.  The Japs learned in the '80s (from us) the
power of false and hyped advertising, and the advantage of pummeling
couch potatoes with tons of it.  Log your cable or broadcast viewing
any given week...Toyota and hell, even Subaru and Mazda will
out-advertise GM OR Ford by as much as 3 to 1.

One has to remember...Americans, by and large, aren't very bright.
They fall for advertising scams like this every time, and have for
over a century.

Because there isn't one.  Lets look at 1971. A Chevy Nova, six banger, auto,
ac, ps,pb AM radio  was $2,200, a Ford Maverick similarly equipped was
$2,100, a Plymouth Duster w/o ac was $1,975, and a VW Beetle 4 spd manual,
no ac, no power steering, no power brakes, no radio was $2,350. The VW was
advertised as a low cost car, yet cost more than the big 3.  The Toyota
entry was the Corolla and it was $1,960, the little sh.t box Honda was $20
cheaper. The Datsun 210 sedan was same price as the Corolla.  None of them
had AC, PS, or automatic tranny at that price.  The whole "cheaper" thing
was all an illusion, but advertising made it seem otherwise, and the
American public will swallow anything.
A lie told often enough becomes "truth".  The Opel Kadette was $1,800, had
more room than the three ricers, a cheaper price, and a better engine, why
didn't it take off?

The biggest issue I see is the big three have some of the lamest advertising
on the market
GM's best car ad in a long time was the one for the Cobalt where it bumps
the Vette.  Mitsubishi is a pile of fertilizer, yet they sell like hot
cakes, they have great advertising.
again a lie told often enough........

Whitelightning

The issue with the automakers & the airlines is a different economic
model.  The don't have to run an entire plant just to make one run of
cars, but they do have to run a flight if it isn't fully booked.  The
Airline business is very capital (fixed asset) intensive.  The
variable costs per passenger is pretty small.  

When auto sales slow down they can idle a plant, cut back shifts,
layoff workers.  When planes are flying at less then capacity its a
bitch.

However, I agree with you that something has to be done to control the
escalating labor costs facing domestic automakers.  Hyundai must be
making a small fortune on its vehicles because I know they don't pay
their workers at the same level as us.  I personally haven't seen that
big of a price differential between their cars and domestically
produced Big 3 ones.  Perhaps I'm missing something.

--

You can run, but you'll only die tired.

ZombyWoof

Oh the real idiot speaks! You really are clueless but as usual shoot
you mouth off about thing you hane no real understanding of. Currently
70% of the cost of building a new car is LABOR!!!!! The market will
not longer support it plan and simple. The big three will go under if
this is not changed as the writing in on the wall. The airlines have
been going through this for years and do not make what they once did.
You are free to beilve othersie but wishing do not make it happen. It
is going to basicall come down to in the next 3 to 5 years tops that
there will either be big waage concessions or they will be out of a
Job because the Big 3 will go bankrupt. The pot is not limitless and
it is getting empty fast and higher fuel prices will be here soon two
with $4 a gallon fuel not far away one day and Detriot is still stuck
on gas hogs that they have to beg people to buy. I bet you beleive
that we can grow our way out of this in the field with ethanol too.
The only problem with tis is if all of the corn was used (leaving none
for food at all) it would only replace about 25 to 30% of the gas used
daily tops but since we have to eat too it will not make that big of
impact. Detriot has their head in the sand and just keeps build the
gas hogs that will soon have gas payments bigger than car payments.
They only way they can survive long term is to get costs down and
lower price of product to offset higher fuel costs or go out of
bussiness. Sure you can blame Toyota and Honda but Detriot gave the
market to them with their limited vision and there fixation with high
profit SUVs since mid 90's that paid labors bills but are not longer
bringing in profit because they are not selling without big discounts
and incentives but you would know this too if you knew math and
ecomonics.  
-----------------
TheSnoMan.com

You friggin idiot! How about you take a 30% pay cut and donate it to the big
3. Your pretty free with everybody else's money, put your's where your big
mouth is!

they could sell vehicle 15%

I think Ford (and GM and Chysler) is in a lot worse shape than they
admit.  They only chance any of them have to survive is to get labor
cost way down and improve quality. It will never happen in current
structuring. They are kidding themselve (managemtn and Labor) if they
think they can pull it off otherwise. Prices have reached critical
mass and can no longer sell to support current costs and benifits. If
they all could cut labor costs 30% or more they could sell vehicle 15%
cheaper across the board and make a profit and boost sales but they
seem to keep hoping that people will except pay more for their car
than some did for a house 20 years ago. The worst is yet to come for
them.
-----------------
TheSnoMan.com

so it's no pressure." <snip>

Don't bet anything but wooden nickels on that line of thinking.
My opinion, and that's all it is, is my opinion, is that the Ford family
wants to take the company private, drive the stock down and its cheaper to
do.
The worst thing for a company is board of directors and a ton of share
holders  more interested in short term stock dividends and ratings, than
long term health of the company and the product.
And public traded companies end up just that way.
Whitelightning

First "improvement" Mulally has to accomplish is to clean up Billy Boy
Ford's doo doo messes.  We will never see another Ford family scion at
the top of this company.  After the disasters of King Henry II and the
latest dingbat, the Ford Family Duchy is finally gone.

Ask him again in six months.

New York Times
DEARBORN, Mich., Oct. 23, 2006 - The Ford Motor Company reported its worst financial results in more than 14 years Monday and warned that its business was likely to worsen further in the months ahead, as it and other Detroit auto companies struggle to reinvent themselves.

Indeed, the new chief executive at Ford, Alan R. Mulally, a former Boeing executive, said the automaker would require a full transformation in the way it thought about consumers and approached the American market.

The typical Detroit turnaround, based on plant closings and introducing a few hit vehicles but with little change in attitude, will not be enough to see Ford through, Mr. Mulally said in an interview at Ford's headquarters here on Monday.

The company, posting a $5.8 billion loss for the third quarter, has to first acknowledge the grim realities of the marketplace and then realign itself to be more productive and nimble.

"The most important thing to watch," Mr. Mulally said, "is do the leaders have a view that's different than the way it's being done today. Because if they don't, we are surely not going to get there."

But there will not be much good news anytime soon for Ford or for the Chrysler Group, which is expected to join Ford on Wednesday in reporting dismal results for the last three months.

Only General Motors, which is slowly bouncing back from one of the worst stretches in its history with savings from deep cost cuts, is expected by Wall Street to earn a profit in the third quarter, of about $300 million, though its American operations may well remain in the red.

The dire straits in Detroit represent the continuing fallout from the auto companies' too-long reliance on gasoline-consuming sport utility vehicles, as well as their failure to develop new cars and trucks to fend off their Asian competitors, particularly Toyota and Honda of Japan and Hyundai of South Korea.

Those foreign companies have built factories in the United States during the last two decades and focused on fuel-efficient vehicles, even as they added S.U.V.'s and pickup trucks to compete in Detroit's last stronghold. That two-part approach paid off in record sales for the Asian makers this summer, when gasoline prices soared above $3 a gallon on average nationwide.

The rapid shift in the preferences of American consumers has been especially hard on Ford and Chrysler, which have been slow to wean themselves away from big vehicles and the outsize profits that such vehicles typically produce.

Including the loss reported Monday - Ford's worst showing since early 1992 - the company could be on track to lose more than the $10.6 billion that G.M. did last year, even though G.M. is one-third bigger. Ford's recent losses were deeper than it, and many on Wall Street, had expected.

Ford executives said the company's operating performance in the final three months of the year would be even worse than its results in the quarter recently ended. And it indicated that it expected its problems to continue through at least the first half of 2007.

At Chrysler, meanwhile, executives are warning Wall Street that it will lose at least $1.5 billion for the last three months when it reports on Wednesday. That is twice as much as Chrysler previously cautioned analysts to expect.

And in another unexpected disclosure, Chrysler acknowledged Monday that it had nearly 100,000 more unsold vehicles on hand this summer than it previously disclosed, at a time when its backlog soared well above industry norms. [Page C6].

The worsening conditions at Ford and Chrysler have, by contrast, made G.M. appear healthier. It began a plan nearly a year ago to cut 30,000 jobs and close all or parts of a dozen plants by 2008.

G.M. has curbed its North American losses, gaining a valuable head start on Ford, said John Casesa, a longtime auto industry analyst.

"This is where G.M. was a year ago," Mr. Casesa said of Ford. Like G.M., "Ford can do two things: borrow more money and sell assets" to buy time until their operations problems are fixed.

Ford already has put a British maker of luxury cars, Aston Martin, up for sale and is believed to be seeking buyers for its other British marques, Land Rover and Jaguar. It has begun a restructuring plan, called the Way Forward, which includes more than 40,000 job cuts and a dozen or more plant closings through 2008.

As a sign of its need for fresh thinking, Ford reached outside the auto industry for a new chief executive, Mr. Mulally, who succeeded William Clay Ford Jr. in the post last month. Mr. Ford continues as chairman.

Mr. Mulally said the company's restructuring plan, devised before he arrived, would continue.

But he is also mounting efforts of his own to make Ford more productive and eventually profitable, following similar steps he took at Boeing. During his time there, Mr. Mulally streamlined production and helped the company remain profitable even when airlines reduced orders after the September 2001 attacks.

At the same time, he must convince Ford employees, shaken by job cuts and the threat to long-cherished benefits like health care, that the company has a vibrant future. Ford, once among the most respected names in corporate America, has been rattled in recent years by a series of high- and midlevel departures, producing a brain drain.

"Even more than turnaround, I would use the word transformation," Mr. Mulally said. "It will require a transformation of the product line and a transformation of the business. You can't do one without the other."

For now, Mr. Mulally is still in a sort of honeymoon period, which, analysts said, may last longer than that of the typical auto company executive, given his newcomer status. After just two weeks on the job, he sent Ford employees an e-mail message telling them that he had three priorities: people, products and productivity.

"I know that the people of Ford have been through some tough times in the past few years," he wrote. "I wasn't here to share that with you, but I am here now to help move us forward," adding that it is "at once the most humbling and exciting prospect of my professional life."

This year, Toyota, which had lagged behind the three Detroit companies in American sales, has passed DaimlerChrysler, which includes its Mercedes and Chrysler Group divisions, to rank by sales as the No. 3 auto company in the United States.

Given the slide at Ford, Toyota is likely to pass it, too, in the next few years. Ford executives have already acknowledged that their company is likely to hold only 14 percent to 15 percent of the American market once its transformation is complete, or about 10 percentage points less than at the beginning of the decade.

In fact, Ford's market share declined to 15.5 percent in the third quarter, a drop of two percentage points from the corresponding period in 2005, and a central reason for its significant loss, which included more than $3 billion in special charges related to the Way Forward plan.

That in itself did not shake Wall Street, but investors were surprised when Ford's chief financial officer, Donat R. Leclair, said in a conference call with analysts that the company expected fourth-quarter performance to be worse than that in the third quarter.

In trading Monday, Ford shares fell 11 cents, to $7.90.

Yet these heavy losses. and the prospect of more, come as the company is seeking to enter the market with a new group of small, more fuel-efficient vehicles.

These include a new crossover vehicle, the Edge, which Ford introduced last week, and it is promising to eventually introduce a subcompact to compete with models sold by G.M., Toyota, Honda and Nissan. Unfortunately for Ford, the smaller vehicles come with an expectation of smaller profits.

In revising its Way Forward plan last month, Ford said it did not expect to earn money in North America until 2009, a year later than it originally predicted. Mr. Leclair said in an interview Monday that Ford anticipated a profit of 3 percent to 5 percent once it emerged from the red.

But getting there will be difficult. Mr. Mulally said Mr. Ford had been "really clear" during its courtship of him that grim days lay ahead. But he said he was not deterred.

"The Ford company is looking at business reality and dealing with it," Mr. Mulally said.

Ford's third-quarter loss, equivalent to $3.08 a share, is more than 20 times that a year earlier, when it lost $284 million, or 15 cents a share.

"Let me make it clear - these results are unacceptable," Mr. Mulally said in the conference call, his first, with analysts and journalists.

Ford also disclosed that it would restate its financial results because of incorrect accounting of derivatives linked to interest rate by its finance arm, Ford Motor Credit.

The company said it was still studying most of the period affected, from 2001 through the third quarter of 2006, but that earnings from 2002 "will improve materially."

Through the first nine months of the year, Ford has lost $7.24 billion, with more than 80 percent of that coming from June to September. By contrast, it earned $1.8 billion in the comparable nine months of 2005.

In the third quarter, Ford's automotive operations lost $1.2 billion, or 62 cents a share, roughly what analysts had expected.

To reduce its work force, Ford is offering buyouts and other incentives valued as high as $140,000 each to all 75,000 hourly workers in the United States. Those workers have until Nov. 27 to decide whether to take one of eight severance packages, while white-collar workers who are offered buyouts are expected to leave by spring.

Shelly Lombard, a senior high-yield bond analyst with the research firm Gimme Credit in New York, said, "We don't expect to see any improvement until the second half of next year, when most of the employees who take the buyout will have exited."

Mr. Casesa said Monday that Mr. Mulally's presence was a rare bright spot for Ford.

"You've got a new C.E.O. with a fresh pair of eyes on Ford's problems," he said. "Increasingly, the market will look to this new C.E.O. for some creative ideas to reinvigorate the revenue line."

For his part, Mr. Mulally said he took the job "because I think we can do this."

"This is an important industry" and Ford has so much opportunity for improvement, he added.

Asked whether he felt pressure from the expectations being placed on his performance, Mr. Mulally replied, "There's no reason why we can't do this, so it's no pressure."

Yet another $.02 worth from a proud owner of a 2001 Ranger and a 1970 Mustang Mach 1 @ http://community.webshots.com/album/18644819fHAehGJAjt