this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2023
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Wow. I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but I feel like Ford's future is going to be a struggle.
You can't simultaneously be late to a growing market, back out of a growing market, and refuse to invest in a growing market and hope to succeed...can you?
They completely killed making any cars smaller then Trucks or SUV's in North America and I really hope it comes back to fuck them.
I'm not crying that they won't make Ford Focuses anymore or whatever, but pretty much only people left to buy affordable, small cars from anymore is the Japanese and Koreans.
Good riddance to Ford. They long outlived their usefulness.
A big reason for that was that American car makers never figured out how to make decent small cars and were getting murdered by their Japanese and Korean competition.
Funny you should mention those two. In the US market they both shipped with a quite defective Ford-developed DCT that would rarely last 50,000 miles before failing. I do not believe whatever the problem is with these transmissions are fixable because the replacements will also fail short of 50,000 miles. I actually own two Fiesta's, one with the 1.0l ecoboom which is currently dead at 84,000 miles due to the plastic used within the engine getting brittle and failing and causing it to catastrophically overheat very quickly (just about all of these 1.0s will fail between 75,000 and 85,000 from what I've seen). I also have a i4/manual version which is about to hit 200,000 miles and runs great. The key in the US market is to get a 5 speed version if you want mostly trouble free ownership. The Fiesta is almost the perfect small car that was mostly ruined due to cost cutting in areas that there shouldn't be any cost cutting happening.
No its because they have less safety and ecological regulations on trucks, as SUVs use truck platforms they no longer have to abide by the same set of regulations and production becomes cheaper. It's always been motivated by profit....
You should blame the EPA for that as well. Their policies incentivize the making of large ass trucks. So the US car manufacturers push them and abandon small cars.
Trucks had regulations for a purpose as they were deemed a utility vehicle for doing a certain set of jobs. Capitalism seeking profit noticed if they can have consumers like SUVs they can use the same regulations as trucks to save cost and increase profit. This is not an uncommon tactic in Capitalism and we have no laws saying it's illegal, you would need congress to give the EPA the ability to go after car companies skirting regulations by manipulating public perceptions to favor suvs and considering how in bed congress is with these big companies that's never gonna happen in the current political landscape we have, not to mention how do you prove that in court. The problem is we as a people have stopped getting involved and slowly watched as are rights writhered away all because we got seduced by convience.
All the domestic manufacturers had to cut their losses on