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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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
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Correct. The US top selling car, however, is the Camry.

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.

 

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')

 

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 shitty heroes!

 

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.

 

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')

 

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 pissed 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.

 

So you're not going for your usual deluded paranoia that the Repbulicans
will steal the election by fraud this time? Funny how that used to be
the liberal mantra (for the last two Presidential elections!). The fact
that they aren't expressing fear about that now means they never
believed it in the first place. But if they lose in November, guess
what they'll be saying? "The Republicans bought off Diebold" "The
elections were rigged". I can't wait.

Bill Putney
(To reply by e-mail, replace the last letter of the alphabet in my
address with the letter 'x')

 

More "projection" from yet another parnoid delusional "sheeple."

 

Wrong again, Putz-ney. He was made fun of by trying to correct a
spelling bee contestant for spelling the SINGULAR of "potato"
correctly. Danny the Quail erroneously thought the American spelling
had an "e" at the end, and it does not.

BUDS...ONE S.

Putz-ney seems to have a lack of education to go along with all that
paranoid delusion.

Jackson's been shoved in a place where he's no longer a problem, as
has Farrakhan. Moore's just a filmmaker. Gore's smarter than two of
your could ever be. The right wing smear against Byrd is hilarious!

Unfortunately, it's ALL true. I subscribe to the Arbitron, and have
the fact. You, Putz-ney, being a typical deluded rightard, have no
facts, but rather enjoy having fiction serve as fact.

Dream on, Putz-ney...here, let me run my Democratic D-9 over you now.
There...that feel better?

Putz-ney = KILLFILE

 

Sorry, they're idiots, and carmakers shouldn't have to cater to idiots.
IMO, people shouldn't be allowed to drive a car on public roads without
a rudimentary understanding of how it works, what it needs, and what to
do when gauges and warning lights do their thing. Drivers who don't
understand the basics are a danger to everyone on the road- I don't want
to be behind a fool who locks up his engine because he thinks the oil
light means "check it in a few days."

 

Are they still even on the air? I thought that mess already bombed.

 

I was thinking Lebanon, Jordan etc, where a 'new' taxi was an eight-year-old
vehicle imported from Germany.

A modern Merc may be too complicated to withstand such rigours now.

BTW, it's not "our" (your) oil money. You buys the oil you pays your money.

Regarding a "reliable" that is my point. At some stage maybe 20/25 years ago
the age of the reliable car began.

DAS
--
For direct contact replace nospam with schmetterling
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No, the saddest part is that so many head-in-the-sand types of all
political persuasions don't see that what is going on NEEDS to be done.
Its not fun, its not pretty, it IS a mess, but its the right thing to do
and its going to take a consistent effort by *several* presidents and
congresses over the next 20-plus years to make the world a reasonably
safe and free place. I think anyone with a brain realized that things
were going to go this way by no later than 5 PM on 9/11/01. We're in it
for the long haul.

 

Fuckin' A well told.

 

Nope! 152 affiliate stations and climbing.

 

Man, I hope you're telling the truth. I met that guy a while back, and he
showed us some of the results of using the system. It's very clever, and
simple too. A decent smog check, under load, in one second for about 10
cents. Nice guy, too.

The ONLY reason not to widely use something like that is bad politics. When
people can get paid $50 for something that's only worth a dime, they'd
prefer to keep doing it.