^Well, it also means they were able to forgo a government loan…which has some PR advantage, if nothing else.
In a perfect world, they would be rewarded for their sound business planning by being able to pick the carcass of GM after it went under. In the real world, GM was covered for its poor planning, to the (at least partial) misfortune of Ford.
If I were young today, with good credit, I’d borrow a bunch of money and put it on black at the roulette wheel. If I won–I’d be set for life. If I lost–I’d just declare bankruptcy. That seems to be the way US corporations are run these days!
Here’s what really happened at Ford. They needed money to keep operating, so they sold their interest in Mazda. If they had not sold their piece of Mazda, they may have gone out of business. A year or two before the bank depression, Ford sold almost everything they owned to get the cash so they wouldn’t go out of business. They happened to be sitting on enough of that cash that they did not have to accept the US Government loans that GM and Chrysler accepted. It was good business sense to sell assets when a lot of cash was needed to pay the bills. But I’m not sure I would call it good business sense to get in that predicament to begin with. When the financial freeze-up occurred, they got lucky.
Maybe in the long run, I see Toyota swallowing up or at least having interest in Mazda as they do Subaru. I would be very interested in a MazSubaToy sport car convertible. They are a Miata Sized ,AWD sports car with a Prius hybrid drive train that gets 60 mpg and is actually fun to drive. Mazda could do that for Toyota. They can’t do it for themselves that’s for sure.
“A Crown Vic is a F-100 in a comfortable wrapper…”
I know you only sort of meant that
Because I’ve worked on Ford trucks and Crown Vics
It seems to me the Crown Vic has little in common with a Ford truck, except perhaps the engine and transmission. It doesn’t have leaf springs, and it’s not meant to carry a load like a truck
The similarity is that they’re both body on frame and Fords, but that’s pretty much it, as far as I’m concerned
Just speculating, but Ford has since dedicated itself to making ‘world cars’. Their European Division was already designing a range of small cars and trucks to sell in Europe and some other markets. Someone at some point decided those European models wouldn’t sell in the US. So Ford made different small and mid-sized cars here. They had long had a small stake in Mazda and they had cooperated on some projects, but in the nineties Ford increased their share in Mazda considerably and handed off the design of small cars for the US to Mazda. That was a pretty good move as they designed/engineered some very successful cars. The decision to have a single line of cars made their investment in Mazda unnecessary, so they sold it off. The termination of this long relationship with very little notice reportedly left a lot of Mazda executives sore. That’s not how business is done in Japan.
Mazda is one of the smallest carmakers, though they were fortunate to have an attractive lineup of vehicles. Their engine labs have been noted for creativity back to rotary days, and Mazda had projects underway to build highly efficient new engines that coukd potentially be either conventional or diesel engines, or both, with one basic design. That gave us the Skyactiv engines, which we are just starting to see. The diesels will be up next, then maybe a dual-mode engine that operates as a diesel when cruising at a steady speed, and uses sparplugs for ignition when more power is needed. That can be a super-efficient design.
Ford’s decision is also looking reasonable. The European models (Fiesta, Focus, Fusion, C-Max, Transit Connect) are nice cars and most are selling well enough. The larger Transit van comes out next year. Their reliability has been noticeably worse than the highly reliable Mazda-designed cars, but I suspect that will improve.
I think part of Ford’s success in Europe is that the smaller cars (Focus, Fiesta) sold there are stick shift. The auto’s in US with dual clutch have caused a lot of issues and taken away from their popularity. I also don’t fully understand the European market. When I was there I saw very few Toyota’s (mostly Prius and Yaris hybrid), but more Mazda and Fords. Peugeot and Renault were mainstream (which was expected).
I suspect you saw a lot of Mazdas because of the long connection with Ford, one of Europe’s biggest brands. Especially big in the British Isles, but common everywhere. Most of the Asian companies got a later start in Europe, to a large extent because of laws that made importing Asian cars very difficult. When the companies built plants there they could also import more cars. Nissan is fairly big in the UK, and Honda much smaller than in the US. Toyotas are fairly common, but most of the models they sell in the US were designed specifically for the US. Except for the Prius and Yaris, you might not recognize some of the models they sell elsewhere. Hyundais are also common. In general the UK has been more accepting of imports because the UK carmakers became irrelevant long ago. Ford has made cars there so long they are practically considered a local company. GM makes and sells cars in the UK as Vauxhall (the same cars sold as Opels on the continent). Even with them making cars there the UK encouraged Asian companies to build plants in the UK before most European countries did.
When i was in the UK & Ireland almost a year ago there were lots of Toyota’s that you might not have recognized if you didn’t read the british car magazines like i do. They have a car called the Avenesis that is essentially their Camry and seemed in Dublin to be a pretty popular Taxi and even police car choce. We rented a Toyota Auris in the UK which is a Corolla 5dr with a name change for that market.
The Ranger would be too close in size and price to the cash cow F150 for comfort. We’ll see how the new Chevy Colorado affects sales of the Silverado.
Oh, believe me, I read every car label and also browsed a lot of their magazines while my wife and kids where window shopping. It was amusing. They had the ad for Toyota Aygo all over the place; “Go Fun Yourself”; I think that would be off limits in US. Despite my curious wanderings, I still didn’t quite see as many Honda and Toyota cars as I see here in South CA. The Accord they had was actually our Acura TSX (not really fair). There were more Lexus than expected. Also 90+% of the regular cars were stick shift.
I managed to take a picture with a Le Car Turbo they had on display in Paris; I had this car way back when I was 19.
I think I paid more attention to cars than I did to the arts and monuments/etc.
On a different note, the trip was fun, but my bank account feels the pain.
Lots of good advice and suggestions made by other posters.
Just went through the same buying process four months ago for a similar size vehicle. I second the recommendations of picking up the Consumer Reports Car Buyers Guide which has a wealth of detailed information. You can also look at multiple websites for specs, reviews from both experts and car owners, reliability, etc. Try researching on such sites as Edmunds, MSN autos, Kelly Blue Book, Cars, and others. That way you get an array of information and reviews from different perspectives. Narrow choices based on the research. Then start test driving. Anything that seems remotely likable be sure to take for more than one test drive and make several of those quite lengthy. It’s even a good idea, once you think you know which car is wanted, to rent one for a couple of days to really run it through its paces and see how well it suits for the everyday typical driving and use such as loading and unloading groceries, parking it, getting in and out of it, etc.
@galant Oh, yeah, looking at all the different cars is one of the benefits of foreign travel. When you go to the UK and see that Toyota has almost an entirely different set of cars for sale, ‘world cars’ make sense. I have no idea who in Toyota has kept them convinced that European buyers are totally different than US buyers. Of course, they are different, but not so much as to require different cars in a particular class. Yes, they are more likely to want a diesel and a stick (though that is changing). But the car could be essentially the same.
Luxury cars make up a larger percentage of total vehicles in many places. The US is the rare place that middle class and working class households often have multiple cars. That would be unusual in Europe, where even middle class urban households often rely on public transit. Car prices there are very high and fuel costs likewise. The wealthy can afford their Lexuses and whatnot. My guess is that Lexus buyers are just trying something different. They’ve had Mercedes and might not like the BMW image.
