Ford CEO Predicts Sales Recovery by End of '09

Robert Farago
by Robert Farago

And I predict Ford CEO Alan Mulally will be proven wrong. Of course, I could be wrong about Mulally being wrong. I mean, I’m the not-so-proverbial nutter in the attic. Big Al’s probably got an entire building full of MBA-owning sales analysts doing nothing but crunching numbers (and hanging out by the water cooler talking about how TTAC talked about them hanging out by the water cooler). I base my false dawn dismissal on three main facts. First, Detroit’s been blowing smoke up the media’s ass since The Boston Americans beat the Pittsburgh Pirates by two runs to clinch the inaugural World Series. If not before. I don’t trust a word they say. Second, same again, only this time not discounting the fact the automakers may actually believe their own delusions. Which is some deeply scary shit. Still. And third, housing starts.

TTAC’s own Ken Elias first gave me the heads-up on Motown’s final descent into bankruptcy two years ago. That’s when he brought my attention to the fact that US housing starts had more or less stopped. It was the worst of all possible worlds for Chrysler, Ford and GM, depending as they did on their pickup trucks for fat profits. When the housing market cratered completely, it was only a matter of time before all that low interest, easy credit home equity cash would dry up, taking car sales into the Sahara with it.

So, where are we now? In April, new housing starts dropped 54.2 percent from the previous year’s totals. Total housing starts: 458,000—the lowest level since Fulgencio Baptista checked out of Havana (1959). Building permits sank 3.3 percent to 494,000 units, the lowest level since the Commerce Department started keeping records (1960).

I reckon the situation is not unlike the car biz. The housing market has to absorb (or plow under) a huge inventory glut and disappear an enormous amount of excess production capacity before it will even begin to get back on its feet. But with the go-go economy gone, the “rabbit in the python” over-supply problem is digesting very. Very. Slowly. How slow? What am I, an economist? But anyone who figures that pickup truck sales are going to bounce back by the start of that most magical of years (2010) is kidding themselves.

Of course, if GM and Chrysler had been allowed to fail, Ford would have done very nicely indeed in that most profitable of vehicular genres, rewarding the only Detroit automaker who stayed away from the federal trough (thanks to the Ford family’s desire to maintain control, but hey, why quibble?). Never mind. If I was Big Al, I’d be thinking about hunker mode, rather than Annie-style promises to the troops. Just sayin’.

Robert Farago
Robert Farago

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  • CarPerson CarPerson on Jun 13, 2009

    When is the Ranger due for a maximum update? Ford will never be the king of trucks with that Neanderthal piece of work in showroom. The superiority (technical design, fit, finish, NVH, refinement and more) of the Toyota and Nissan is incredibly obvious to anyone comparing them. Is the problem the F150 is sucking up every development truck buck they have?

  • U mad scientist U mad scientist on Jun 13, 2009
    And from Nouriel Roubini another one of the few economist who predicted this and continues to be correct. He's actually saying some of the stuff I've mentioned before, like temporaneous weak growth. - If the gov’t was smart (an oxy-moron, emphasis on moron) they would create investment tax credits for target industries and temporarily protect American markets, to stimulate real capital investment, i.e., to give the wealthy something else to buy with their money other than oil futures…..but they won’t because damned liberals don’t really understand economics, and also don’t have a grasp on how tax policy and trade policy are necessary tools to stimulate the economy when necessary You're not quite getting how ranting works. You need to match policy to its actual supporters, not just tack the dumb "gov === bad, liberal === bad" rule to the end of some random statement. For example, if demonstrating that dumb rule is the goal, you need to make sure you're not advocating the same thing the bad people are. Your last statement needs to be directed at the morons who didn't bother reading the econ 101 website much less the book, because there are sure a lot of them offering "free market" advice these days.
  • Rochester "better than Vinfast" is a pretty low bar.
  • TheMrFreeze That new Ferrari looks nice but other than that, nothing.And VW having to put an air-cooled Beetle in its display to try and make the ID.Buzz look cool makes this classic VW owner sad 😢
  • Wolfwagen Is it me or have auto shows just turned to meh? To me, there isn't much excitement anymore. it's like we have hit a second malaise era. Every new vehicle is some cookie-cutter CUV. No cutting-edge designs. No talk of any great powertrains, or technological achievements. It's sort of expected with the push to EVs but there is no news on that front either. No new battery tech, no new charging tech. Nothing.
  • CanadaCraig You can just imagine how quickly the tires are going to wear out on a 5,800 lbs AWD 2024 Dodge Charger.
  • Luke42 I tried FSD for a month in December 2022 on my Model Y and wasn’t impressed.The building-blocks were amazing but sum of the all of those amazing parts was about as useful as Honda Sensing in terms of reducing the driver’s workload.I have a list of fixes I need to see in Autopilot before I blow another $200 renting FSD. But I will try it for free for a month.I would love it if FSD v12 lived up to the hype and my mind were changed. But I have no reason to believe I might be wrong at this point, based on the reviews I’ve read so far. [shrug]. I’m sure I’ll have more to say about it once I get to test it.
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