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#1
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Ford takes a dive, DC will be #2 soon
Ford announced today that they are offering early retirement buyouts
for over 75,000 employees today, showing that, rather than try to compete, they're going to basically fold their tent. Billy Boy Ford, like any good rat, sensed a sinking ship and bailed out. Looks like DaimlerChrysler will soon be #2, nipping at the heels of a totally moribund GM while Ford slowly disintegrates. According to JD Power and industry sales figures posted in the LA Times and Wall Street Journal, DC is the only one of the "Big 3" that's selling anything at all. GM and Ford, stupidly continuing to build and try to sell gas guzzlers, is stuck with a huge unsold inventory problem and sales as bad as 30% behind last year's, while Ford's "hybrid SUV" program fell flat on its ass, as will GM's equally stupid plan for silliness like hybrid Escalades and Suburbans. DC's sales are actually up compared to the same season last year, and the Ram truck line is poised to knock Ford out of the box for #1 in the profitable pickup truck line. They've already run around GM, whose customer "loyalty base" is collapsing fast. The GM line that had the least losses so far: Saturn. Worst: Chevrolet. Ford sales are similarly down across all model lines, with the formerly hot Focus now suffering from a poor restyle and the new Fusion sucking air. Only Ford cars without excess inventory: Mustangs and T-Birds, and the T-Bird is strictly a "niche" car with very low production numbers. Unconfirmed reports are that Ford has a 200 day (!!!!) back inventory of F-150s they cannot sell. Sounds like Chrysler before Iacocca took over in the '70s...yards and lots FULL of unsold cars which they had to give away to the dealers just to move them. So much for US automakers. Looks like the Germans may soon be #1 here! Yet another case of US management being incompetent. Not everything's rosy for DC, however...the Japs, as well as the Koreans, are making significant inroads into car sales across the board, with upstart former junk peddler Hyundai/Kia leading the charge with underpriced throw-aways. The only bad news for Japan comes from GM's former "hedge bet," Suzuki, and from perenial underdog Subaru, whose sales are declining after its disastrous restyling effort and outright failure of its "Tribeca" crossover SUV. #1 selling car line in the US: Toyota, led by the vanilla-flavored Camry, truly a "car for dummies" if there ever was one. Honda's sales, unexpectedly, are flat over last year, and their Ridgeline "truck" is turning out to be a bigger failure than Nissan's V8-powered Frontier. Both may be gone as early as next year. While Japan, Inc. crushed the Big 3 with mini-trucks in the '70s, they've tried multiple times and failed to crack the big truck field, which in itself is a dying breed for consumers. The Toyota Tundra is selling better than both the Honda and Nissan, but sales are dropping considerably over last year. |
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#2
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Ford takes a dive, DC will be #2 soon
What I can't understand about Ford and GM and even Chrysler, before giving
everything up and firing a huge number of employees, why not address the quality issue by offering a free extended bumper to bumper service agreement with each new car sold. Not this driveline warranty BS that everyone knows won't actually pay for anything that is likely to break. Seems to me an extended service agreement for free would be less drastic than slowly going out of business. And in the mean time they could improve quality of bread and butter components like alterantors, speed sensors and the like. The crap that drives American car buyers crazy. |
#3
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Ford takes a dive, DC will be #2 soon
On Fri, 15 Sep 2006 02:07:55 GMT, "Art"
> wrote: >What I can't understand about Ford and GM and even Chrysler, before giving >everything up and firing a huge number of employees, why not address the >quality issue by offering a free extended bumper to bumper service agreement >with each new car sold. Not this driveline warranty BS that everyone knows >won't actually pay for anything that is likely to break. Seems to me an >extended service agreement for free would be less drastic than slowly going >out of business. And in the mean time they could improve quality of bread >and butter components like alterantors, speed sensors and the like. The >crap that drives American car buyers crazy. <snip> The other side of that coin is that an increasing amount of Americans have no clue as to how to maintain a car nor have the desire, and ANY failure of ANY component, including the frigging oil, is unacceptable and incomprehensible to them. That's why the dummies all buy Camrys...they go and go and go for 100K miles without proper servicing, and then the dummies throw them out like trash. I blame it on the "dumbing down" of America in general. Bumper-to-bumper warrantys DO draw more floor traffic and increase sales, and Chrysler under Iacocca DID offer them...for awhile. You'll also remember back in the "good ol' days" when Chrysler stumped the other two with the first 5 year/50K mile powertrain warranty...NOT that it cost them too much, since their power plants and transmissions were arguably the most hardy in the industry. But people, being people, always try to scam these inclusive warrantys for stuff that's considered "consumable" and for stuff that was damaged by obvious abuse, such as 50K mile oil change intervals and the like. You also have to look at the Euros AND the Japanese, neither of whom offer bumper-to-bumper warrantys either, but outsell the "Big 2" (Ford and GM) anyway. More and more, Chrysler is simply becoming a division of Daimler Benz AG, and more and more becoming a German presence in the US market, rather than a US automaker. That MAY be why they're selling stuff, and the "Big 2" aren't. |
#4
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Ford takes a dive, DC will be #2 soon
That sounds somewhat supercilious to condemn all those millions of car
buyers all over the world who see the car only as a tool and are not in the least interested in the minutiae of maintenance. I bet most of them still change their oil and get their cars serviced one way or another. If I am not mistaken, the world's top-selling car is the Corolla. One of the reasons Merc cars were so popular in the Middle East was their need to be serviced only when they broke down...and that did not happen unduly often. The biggest breakthrough in automotive technology was the reliable car. DAS For direct contact replace nospam with schmetterling --- "DeserTBoB" > wrote in message ... [...] > > The other side of that coin is that an increasing amount of Americans > have no clue as to how to maintain a car nor have the desire, and ANY > failure of ANY component, including the frigging oil, is unacceptable > and incomprehensible to them. That's why the dummies all buy > Camrys...they go and go and go for 100K miles without proper > servicing, and then the dummies throw them out like trash. I blame it > on the "dumbing down" of America in general. [...] |
#5
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Ford takes a dive, DC will be #2 soon
On Fri, 15 Sep 2006 16:46:28 +0100, "Dori A Schmetterling"
> wrote: >If I am not mistaken, the world's top-selling car is the Corolla. <snip> Correct. The US top selling car, however, is the Camry. >One of the reasons Merc cars were so popular in the Middle East was their >need to be serviced only when they broke down...and that did not happen >unduly often. <snip> Yes. When I was in Saudi, you'd see the desert littered with near-new Mercedeses. The towelies would just drive them until they broke down, even for ridiculously small reasons, walk away from them, go back to Riyahd and buy a new one...with our oil money. Another American saw a gold mine and tried to harvest all these abandoned Benzes and export them to the US and Europe, and almost had his hands chopped off for his trouble. Such is "shariya," and such is the stupidity of Americans for funding this insanity since the 1940s, courtesy of Mr. Hunt, and yes....Senator Prescott Bush. A "reliable car" isn't an unattainable feat. I've found that, over nearly 40 years, that just about any reasonably engineered car can be very reliable with a modicum of routine maintenance and a little homework by the owner. However, a poorly engineered one (Chevrolet Vega/Pontiac Astre, Hyundai Excel and pre-Ford Jags, as well as anything British, French or Italian come immediately to mind) will fail and fail again, no matter how well maintained they are. Thus, a savvy car buyer needs to understand the most basic "basics" of how the machine works and how it's maintained to expect any sort of longevity out of it. FWIW, Benzes are NOT all that "reliable." There's simply too much diverse technology in those cars not to fail ocassionally. The Southern California Air Quality Management District, perhaps the US' foremost authority on automotive pollution, has found that gas powered Mercedeses have been consistantly the most undermaintained, and thus dirtiest running, cars on the road. This bolsters a finding by a University of Colorado professor who originally designed the "on the road" infrared smog check system in the '80s, as was exposed on "60 Minutes" back then. After years of attempts by the "smog check" industry's and the car dealers' lobbyists to keep this system out of service, it is now being implemented on freeway on ramps all over Southern California. Skinflint Mercedes owners can soon expect "pollution tickets" to be arriving in the mail. |
#6
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Ford takes a dive, DC will be #2 soon
DeserTBoB wrote:
> Ford announced today that they are offering early retirement buyouts > for over 75,000 employees today, showing that, rather than try to > compete, they're going to basically fold their tent. Is Air America going to do something similar for their employees? Or are George Soros and Al Franken going to bail them out since there is no viable market for their product? Bill Putney (To reply by e-mail, replace the last letter of the alphabet in my address with the letter 'x') |
#7
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Ford takes a dive, DC will be #2 soon
On Fri, 15 Sep 2006 13:36:58 -0400, Bill Putney >
wrote: >Is Air America going to do something similar for their employees? Or >are George Soros and Al Franken going to bail them out since there is no >viable market for their product? <snip> You obviously live in the usual deluded world of right wingerism, where fact is fiction and fiction fact. Arbitron shows that AA is slowly but steadily gaining market share with their 150-some odd affiliates, while Flush Limpdick, Bill O'Rightly and Sean Insanity are dropping like rocks, up to 60% in some major markets. Limpdick has already been thrown out of a few major markets for low ratings, and has been kicked off of AM drive on several West Coast stations and moved to the midday timeslot, where ad card time is cheaper. Baltimore recently got rid of him altogether. Wake up...it's over. That's OK...you and Charlie Nudo can massage each other while the Democrats take over the House (and maybe the Senate, too!) and throw George W. Bush into the dustbin of history along with Rummy and "Mr. Point 'N Shoot" Cheney. Meanwhile, you can contribute to the "Keep Flush Hard" fund so he can continue to buy more illegal Viagra and smuggle it through Customs...not to mention feed his OxyContin dope habit. You right wingers sure have some ****ty heroes! |
#8
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Ford takes a dive, DC will be #2 soon
The saddest part is GW is determined to leave his mess to the next president
to clean up. The generals don't ask for more troops in Iraq because their mission is not to destroy the insurgency but only to train Iraqi troops and police. So thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians are doomed to die because GW doesn't have the guts to put the needed amount of troops in Iraq to fix what he broke or to just plain get the hell out. "DeserTBoB" > wrote in message ... > On Fri, 15 Sep 2006 13:36:58 -0400, Bill Putney > > wrote: > >>Is Air America going to do something similar for their employees? Or >>are George Soros and Al Franken going to bail them out since there is no >>viable market for their product? <snip> > > You obviously live in the usual deluded world of right wingerism, > where fact is fiction and fiction fact. Arbitron shows that AA is > slowly but steadily gaining market share with their 150-some odd > affiliates, while Flush Limpdick, Bill O'Rightly and Sean Insanity are > dropping like rocks, up to 60% in some major markets. Limpdick has > already been thrown out of a few major markets for low ratings, and > has been kicked off of AM drive on several West Coast stations and > moved to the midday timeslot, where ad card time is cheaper. Baltimore > recently got rid of him altogether. Wake up...it's over. > > That's OK...you and Charlie Nudo can massage each other while the > Democrats take over the House (and maybe the Senate, too!) and throw > George W. Bush into the dustbin of history along with Rummy and "Mr. > Point 'N Shoot" Cheney. Meanwhile, you can contribute to the "Keep > Flush Hard" fund so he can continue to buy more illegal Viagra and > smuggle it through Customs...not to mention feed his OxyContin dope > habit. > > You right wingers sure have some ****ty heroes! |
#9
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Ford takes a dive, DC will be #2 soon
DeserTBoB wrote:
> On Fri, 15 Sep 2006 13:36:58 -0400, Bill Putney > > wrote: > > >>Is Air America going to do something similar for their employees? Or >>are George Soros and Al Franken going to bail them out since there is no >>viable market for their product? <snip> > > > You obviously live in the usual deluded world of right wingerism, > where fact is fiction and fiction fact. Arbitron shows that AA is > slowly but steadily gaining market share with their 150-some odd > affiliates, while Flush Limpdick, Bill O'Rightly and Sean Insanity are > dropping like rocks, up to 60% in some major markets. Limpdick has > already been thrown out of a few major markets for low ratings, and > has been kicked off of AM drive on several West Coast stations and > moved to the midday timeslot, where ad card time is cheaper. Baltimore > recently got rid of him altogether. Wake up...it's over. > > That's OK...you and Charlie Nudo can massage each other while the > Democrats take over the House (and maybe the Senate, too!) and throw > George W. Bush into the dustbin of history along with Rummy and "Mr. > Point 'N Shoot" Cheney. Meanwhile, you can contribute to the "Keep > Flush Hard" fund so he can continue to buy more illegal Viagra and > smuggle it through Customs...not to mention feed his OxyContin dope > habit. > > You right wingers sure have some ****ty heroes! Hmmm - lefties made fun of Quayle for spelling the plural of potato like that (but they don't care if something's right or wrong - as long as they can criticize and tear down, eh?). Our heros/heroes are good. We're not into your budds Teddy Kennedy, Jesse Jackson, Bill Clinton, Michael Moore, Al Gore, Robert "Sheets" Byrd, Louis Farrakhan, etc. I don't think even one thing you said is true. Hopefully Airhead America will stay in business propped up by Soros or Streisand or Moore. That'll help Republicans come erection (you seem to like suggestive plays on words) time. Bill Putney (To reply by e-mail, replace the last letter of the alphabet in my address with the letter 'x') |
#10
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Ford takes a dive, DC will be #2 soon
On Fri, 15 Sep 2006 18:37:00 GMT, "Art"
> wrote: >The saddest part is GW is determined to leave his mess to the next president >to clean up. The generals don't ask for more troops in Iraq because their >mission is not to destroy the insurgency but only to train Iraqi troops and >police. So thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians are doomed to die because >GW doesn't have the guts to put the needed amount of troops in Iraq to fix >what he broke or to just plain get the hell out. <snip> That's because he's a moron...as are most of his sheeple who still think he's "great." I wonder what they'll give my wife for killing her son.... Latest Bush numbers: Bush approval 39%. Disapproval 55%! For the record, Bush's job approval numbers haven't managed to hit 43% in ANY NATIONAL POLL in over a year and a half, an historic low trend. Latest Congressional numbers: Generic ballot, Dems vs. GOP: Dems favored to win, 53% to 41%. This trend has been in place also for over a year. Even fatass blowhard Tony Blankley in the Moonie-controlled Washington Times rag says that "history favors the Democrats" in this election. Further proof is that the California Democratic Party started running very stark, unadorned video of Arnold Schwarzenegger leading a pro-Bush rally before the '04 election, with him saying many times, "GEORGE W. BUSH! GEORGE W. BUSH!" Since the ads started airing, AHHHnuld's numbers have tumbled 5%, and they've only been running three days. It appears that the stench of "Dubya" is now rubbing off on many of his collaborators! Add to that that he's ****ed off the church nutters by not magically converting the US to a Taliban-like christian theocracy, and you have real trouble for any Republican, anywhere. |
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