“Ford put the world on wheels.”

Good idea. That brings back memories of Henry Ford I, the Model T, and what Ford did to make the automobile accessible to the common man (and woman).

michaelC: And what quality measures is Ford pointing to? JD Powers initial quality?

Consumer Reports and Michael Karesh, who administers the truedelta survey site, have confirmed Ford’s improving quality. Whether it is as good as Honda and Toyota across the Ford entire lineup is certainly open to debate, but the bottom line is that Ford HAS improved quality, and is breaking away from GM and Chrysler in this regard.

Ronnie Schreiber: 2) Considering that Ford and Chrysler have sold a lot more vehicles than Honda, it looks like the house of Soichiro has some tranny problems, and I’m not talking about some guy named Hideo wearing a kimono.

I agree that Honda goofed up with its transmissions. The company made a major error, and it was far more widespread than the Toyota sludge problem (although, for some reason, the Toyota sludge problem is the one that domestic apologists remember).

But comparing the number of internet hits with total sales for each company is misleading. Not all models from each manufacturer were affected by transmission problems.

At Honda, the regular Civic models were not plagued by transmission troubles. Neither were many of the four-cylinder Accords. Transmission troubles plagued early Civic hybrids, the 1999-2003 Odyssey, Acura TL and CL models from the early 2000s, and V-6 Accords from the late 1990s to the early 2000s.

At Ford the models with transmission troubles were the Taurus/Sable with the 3.8 V-6, the Windstar, the post-1996 Taurus/Sables with the 3.0 overhead cam V-6, and the 2002-04 Explorer. Other Ford models were not affected – including the Taurus/Sable models with the overhead valve 3.0 V-6 (the transmission couldn’t handle the extra power put out by the 3.8 V-6 and the overhead cam 3.0 V-6).

There is also the question of how fast each company corrected the problem. Ford didn’t correct its problematic transmissions on the Taurus/Sable and Windstar for over a decade. Honda moved much faster.

Ronnie,

You make a good point about designing an implementation of a technology. ‘Stuff happens’ is a deep truth (For those who may doubt that, consider the opposite statement for a moment and reflect on your view of the World if that were true).

Systems in the real world are more complex than the systems we can model in the design process. Failures always have a statistical component and it is, as a practical matter, impossible to test long-tail situations. The story about your friend’s death reminded me of a similar situation in my extended family.

Many customers are willing to accept ’stuff happens’ with some grumbling (and it is a rare person that does not grumble when bad luck arrives) if they feel it really was out of the control of the manufacturer. It seems quite plausible the proximate cause for head failure (and flying spark plugs) is improperly torqued spark plugs. I have no idea how the specified torque range compares with other engines and whether it is a reasonable expectation for real-world maintainers of vehicles — including the shade tree mechanic — to comply. It could be that Ford’s engineers in effect demanded more precision on a common procedure than the average mechanic was likely to deliver.

If so, is that a design flaw? I don’t know. A car as a system is more than its components — maintenance, available fuel, etc. are all part of it. Fussy vehicles, like some women exotics, come to be known through their reputation for maintenance and are embraced, or not, with awareness a particularly knowledgeable and precise mechanic is required. The Ford brand, whatever it is, certainly does not have (or want) that feature.

If cost constraints on engineers have forced them to designs that have little tolerance for ‘errors’, then I think there is a profound point about the expected reliability of the entire vehicle. Mercedes was, not so long ago, famous for reliability because they were ‘overdesigned’. Many TTACers might agree that reputation is fading fast, if not already gone, because the drei-starr found they could make more money by cutting out the ‘overengineering’.

I remember Detroit in the 60s and 70s as not having such a reputation for sophistication or ‘excitement’ as compared to European brands. MGBs were far cooler than Mustangs. Rather it was that they were more reliable and sensible because they were not designed to the limit.

Of course the sad point is that then, being designed to the limit always had the implication that it was to the limit of performance, not the lowest cost to manufacture.

So, to summarize this off-topic discussion about reliability in a branding thread, I think we have come around to considering how perceptions of product reliability qua ‘design flaws’ may be an important part of the brand identity.

Best,

Michael

Regarding misgivings about quality, Hyundai and Volkswagen both offered extended warantee coverage to help bring customers back. I own a 99 Honda Accord with the automatic with many failures. Honda extended warantee coverage to 7 years and 100k miles and replaced many transmissions for free. Not good, but at least customers didn’t feel “burned” by the experience.

Maybe Ford should shift their fleet sales to the almost dead Mercury brand. One problem with Fords is poor resale value in part due to cars Hertz, etc. dump into the used car market.

most of us have wanted the Detroit (no longer Big) 2.05 to “make it” as well….we just don’t see how, as currently managed, with the exception of Ford, they can. And we don’t see how pouring money down a rat hole will prevent the failures….

I have not in my life read, watched or listened to so much negative press. It’s gas on a fire. Keep it up and we’ll all go back to buck skins and knives. Together.

Clearly, Ford has work to do. As they all do. Mulally gets one thing: I was 10 feet from him last week in a speech, and he clearly knows that PRODUCT is king. Have you seen the new Mustang GT? I am tempted, and I haven’t owned a Ford in over 20 years. Too bad there isn’t an endless supply of baby boomers.

It’s a start. I want the Big 3 to make it. Seems like I’m in a distinct minority here. Sad.

So don’t ask me to drive one, I already did and now I drive foreign. Next car will be foreign. is that unpatriotic? Not as much as screwing the American consumer with faulty designs and then spending the profits overseas buying companies. Looks like they provided plenty of jobs for non-Americans. Let those that work for Ford ( and GM Cry-sler) overseas bail these companies out. Then they can buy more assets over there. While they are at it move their headquarters out of the US so they don’t stick their hands in our pockets anymore.

The one thing missing in the 2.8 plans is customer willingness to take a chance and spend thousands of dollars again on their products. Even if they are reliable and fuel efficient, the resale value bites you in the ass. I don’t have any more charity to give them. My Hyundai has retained more value the last 4 years than any Ford I ever owned.

They can’t fix this problem.

I once conceptually designed an employee hand washing monitoring system. Putting a sign up reminding them to wash their hands, something I’ve alway found a little unsettling as a patron, does nothing. You need metric to be able to improve. At the same time, it’s not wise to share some of those metrics with the public. The public wants 0 colonies of fecal coliform in the petri dish.

Sticking with Ford, acknowledging they have not been so good in the past has been a consistent subtext to some of their more memorable advertising campaigns.

That’s endemic in Detroit. Cf. That’s a Saturn? That thing got a HEMI?

Honda lover, my first thoughts on seeing those figures are:
1) Considering the POS 604 transmission from Chrysler I’m surprised there weren’t more hits.
2) Considering that Ford and Chrysler have sold a lot more vehicles than Honda, it looks like the house of Soichiro has some tranny problems, and I’m not talking about some guy named Hideo wearing a kimono.

50merc,

I’d love to see TTAC include an automotive history heading. You’re not the only person who enjoys the history of industry. The Henry Ford Museum is one of my favorite places.

The auto industry has a long history. Along with some great successes there were huge mistakes. Nobody seems to have learned anything from them. How many great ideas have been tried only to be hamstrung by inadequate development and later implemented successfully by others?

Speaking of history, did you know that the same guy, Frederick Wm Lanchester, invented both caliper disc brakes and fuel injection? The guy was a flat out genius.

Clearly there’s a problem with aluminum Ford heads. I just got off the phone with a guy who offers an on location repair service, with a warranty, because the dealers want so much for the repair.
http://www.pgsparkplugrepair.com/home

Having worked in r&d for a tier 1 supplier, I won’t necessarily hold a design flaw against a company, particularly if they make good on the repairs (unless it’s a particularly stupid or greedy mistake). I doubt Ford wants self-ejecting spark plugs. People say the problem is too few threads, 5, for the plugs but I’ve always been told that three threads are all that is needed for maximum torque, so my guess is that plugs are being installed with improper torque. In every industry the technology is almost always pushed to the limit. Customers, industrial and consumer alike, want faster, stronger, better and sometimes the technology ends up at the limits of the performance envelope. You do the best you can, but nothing’s perfect in the world. A former coworker of mine was killed on the job when a 2.5 ton mold half fell off the molding machine and crushed him as he stood in the cavity doing some kind of service on the machine.

It was one of the largest injection molding machines in the world at the time, virtually one of a kind. The molds were bolted in and torqued down to proper specifications. Nobody knew, however, that at the high levels of pressure used to inject the melted plastic the molds were warping slightly, stretching the bolts. When the pressure was released, the slightly longer bolts were no longer torqued properly and they eventually walked themselves out. The mold fell off and he was pinned to the floor. From the chest up he looked okay. His wife worked for the company too and it was tragic. I’m sure she got a big settlement to avoid a wrongful death lawsuit, but she never blamed either our employer or the company that made the molding press. Like I said, limits of technology. Stuff happens.

Fortunately, most of the time when stuff happens, nobody gets killed.

As I see it the villains here are the dealers who try to sell a completely new head when there are specialty tools and parts that can fix it in situ.

The guy I linked to above will travel to your vehicle and fix it for less than most dealers will charge.

A customer with a fixed problem is often more loyal than one without a problem in the first place. Ford should have a program for fixing the threads with an insert and charge only cost for out of warranty repairs to the heads.

[Ford transmission problem] -1,070,000
[Chrysler transmission problem] – 661,000
[Honda transmission problem] – 917,000

Ronnie,

Forget the number of search hits. I provided a link to a site where people (one or more per day) have recorded their experience with spark plugs being thrown out of the head. The cost of repair is high.

I take the frequency of complaints to be an indication this is a significant issue. It looks to be a design issue.

I did not look through the entire thread — it is quite long — but there is large range of years involved (a number of late ’90s, but the latest I saw was 2005 model year). So this can be taken as evidence Ford did not correct the design issue for some time (and perhaps has not yet corrected the issue).

How is it unreasonable for someone to conclude they should not buy a product from a company with a long-running design defect? One that they apparently refuse to acknowledge, leaving the customer on the hook.

If a company already has a shaky reputation, exactly how does this situation keep existing customers and attract new ones?

Michael

(Acknowledging this not about banding per se and so is off-topic…)

While I disagree the employee hand washing example is relevant, I accept your point it is difficult to advertise reality because most people have a hard time understanding statistics and will draw the wrong conclusions. We know risk adversity is a basic bias, and people will amplify the risk implicit in a statistical measure.

Re: MTBF design criteria

It’s true that Honda, Toyota (and everyone) does not provide this information, but they do not have a reputation for poor reliability.

Re: Detroit can’t win. Must they acknowledge they made poor vehicles in the past?

The D3 has more or less continually acknowledged they have produced poor vehicles in the past. The recent comments from the top executives that things are much improved are rife. But this has been going on for years. Sticking with Ford, acknowledging they have not been so good in the past has been a consistent subtext to some of their more memorable advertising campaigns. Remember ‘Quality is job one’; ‘Have you driven a Ford, lately?’? Saying they have really caught up in the last couple of years comes against a long history of having claimed to have made amends on quality and reliability.

Re: D3 is dealing with quality perception problem

And what quality measures is Ford pointing to? JD Powers initial quality? The D3 can certainly continue to keep secret the real numbers and play the game of claiming to have improved. This has been the MO for years. The problem is most former customers (and those who have never been customers) will wait until direct and anecdotal experience convinces them the reliability of a D3 vehicle is equal to that of Toyota, Honda etc. I can see no evidence to think the D3 is even close right now across their product lines. If you have numbers – or some other compelling evidence (say warranty claims) – I’d love to see the data.

The fact of the matter is that the D3 will be long dead or irrelevant by the time they can demonstrate they are equal to other world class auto manufacturers using the usual indicators of reliability customers find compelling:
– personal experience,
– anecdotal facts, and
– resale value.
As has been remarked many times, the D3 have been digging this hole for over 25 years. It will take 10 to reverse that situation if they were equal to the competition today.

Again, some dramatic move to link their products and reliability is needed. If they aren’t desperate enough to tell the truth (at least to an audience that knows how to interpret the truth), perhaps a 100,000 mile comprehensive warranty or a guaranteed resale value program would do the trick.

The point that Toyota or Honda would not do something like this is correct. But then, they have invested in a reputation for quality products over many years. The D3 have not. The consequences have arrived and the D3 must do something dramatic to answer the quality ‘perception’ problem.

Michael

So how about this:

“Ford put the world on wheels.”

Yeah, it may appeal mostly to lovers of automotive history like Menno and me. But you gotta admit, it’s something no other maker can honestly say.

Would you suggest that restaurants publicize stats that show that 99% of their employees wash their hands after using the bathroom?

If D3 is engineering and building as well as the Japanese, etc., then challenge other car makers to provide the same data. Make it a point in your advertising.

Quality stats are indeed one of the key points in Ford’s Drive One campaign. Do they include the proprietary data you’d like to see? No, but then Toyota and Honda don’t publicize that data either.

The D3 might do well to bolster their claims of improved reliability by providing data on the designed (and tested) MTBF of the major components of the car. Show the history of improvement.

Detroit can’t win. Showing a “history of improvement” will be spun as “Detroit made crap in the past and we’re skeptical that the improvements are lasting”.

Since this thread is about rebranding, how about if General Motors ditches the name GM? In a market where more people know about Britney Spears than know who lost World War II, a market where buyers of Hyundais consider them because of Japanese reputation for quality, who knows, maybe killing the GM brand might make sense.

Stranger things have happened. Trini & Carmen’s is thriving, 30 years after poisoning more than 50 customers.

“The only automotive defect”? I cited two examples, Toyota engine sludge and Honda transmissions. I guess in a universe where 2,500 is HUGE compared to 25,000 or 80,000 two examples count as “the only”.

I certainly didn’t try to sweep anything under the rug. If you actually read my comment you’d see that I said that if specialty tool companies sell tools to fix this specific problem with Ford spark plugs, then obviously Ford has a measurable problem.

As for the methodological shortcomings of using Google results to prove a point, it’s admittedly a shorthand approach, but if you actually bothered to try to see my point instead of reflexively bashing Detroit defenders, you would see that I was responding to someone who said, “A Web search reveals a HUGE number of folks confronted by spark plugs launched into the atmosphere.” He then went on to say that Ford’s spark plug problem is a reason why he’ll buy a Honda or Toyota next time.

There’s a form of Talmudic debate called k’shitatcha, according to your opinion. It’s not a tu quoque argument, akin to saying that Toyota or Honda are just as bad as Ford. It applies a debater’s own logic or methodology to their own position. He was the one who used a web search to prove his point.

I simply applied his own methodology to see if Ford had a HUGE problem relative to the transplants. If you have a problem with using web searches to determine the number of consumers with a specific problem, take it up with the above poster, not me.

No, and I’ll tell you why: patriotic fatigue on one hand and further questions asked on the other .

So many shoddy organizations and plans have attempted to play the patriotism card that, for a company to resort to it in modern times, they have to be either ignorant, stupid and/or desperate. The flag is a fall-back position when your plan or product has nothing else to recommend it.

The flag is now code for “substandard product trying to appeal to mouth-breathing nationalists”, especially in the more lucrative markets. The automakers themselves are responsible for wrecking the value of America as a brand: “it may be sloppy, cheap or low-quality, but at least it’s American!” practically defined Detroit marketing for the last quarter-century.

Two: saying “American” begs the question of what exactly does it mean to be American, in relation to a product? To give a recent example, I was in a toy store looking for a trike for my son, and the owner was pushing me on how one model was better because it was made in Germany. Now, because I’ve had the pleasure of dealing with Volkswagen and Mercedes in the past, this didn’t endear me, but for most people it’s sufficient.

What does it mean to be made in Japan? Korea? How about China or Malaysia? Now, how about “American”? The only people it’s going work on are the static (or declining) sales that they’ve already got. It doesn’t mean anything with relation to the product, or if it does, it doesn’t mean anything good.

America has no brand equity. Inside America it was destroyed by the companies that raped it’s image; outside it was destroyed by American government over the past eight years, though Barack Obama’s done wonders for American foreign relations and he’s not even been elected yet. Maybe Detroit needs to license Barack’s “Change” theme?

Back on topic: Product is king, not brand, not marketing. Much as it pains marketing people to admit this, you can only sell crap for so long, no matter how good your plan it, before it catches up to you. Then you’ve the unenviable task of trying to fix your market image that you wrecked by promising way more than you could deliver.

Mercedes et al are going to find that out very, very soon.

Easy when they never leave the show room.

Citing the number of search engine hits as an indicator of the actual probability of X happening the in the world is naiive. For example, search terms affect results greatly. And, of course, number of web sites does not translate to number of incidents.

Here is a better way to gauge if this is a significant problem.

A quick search on “ford spark plugs V8 pop out”
brings up:

http://www.consumeraffairs.com/automotive/ford_spark.html

The frequency of new complaints would seem to provide an indication of the problem incidence. I’d judge that one or more new complaints a day is significant considering this is one website and the probability someone will find the website and complain. Obviously, there are many Fords out there so the rate per vehicle may still be quite small, but what is striking here is the failure mode. How many of us have ever heard of a vehicle throwing spark plugs? It does sound like bad design, and the range/age of vehicles involved leads one to think this is a problem Ford never bothered to address.

As for the comment (’…they got their money’s worth..’), should one expect the mean mileage to failure for the head of an engine to be 170,000 miles? If so, this does not give me confidence the engine, and by extension the entire vehicle, is well engineered.

How to (rapidly) convince people of the new reliability of D3 iron

The D3 might do well to bolster their claims of improved reliability by providing data on the designed (and tested) MTBF of the major components of the car. Show the history of improvement. For the TTAC crowd, just tell us the (designed) acceptable failure rate of major subsystems (engine, transmission, etc.) during warranty and we can work out the probable failure rate after warranty. If D3 is engineering and building as well as the Japanese, etc., then challenge other car makers to provide the same data. Make it a point in your advertising.

Until then, people will judge how far a car will go without major failure by their direct and anecdotal experience of car makes. The D3 is more than a little burdened by customer’s past experience. Is it not reasonable for people to assume D3 engines, transmissions and other components are designed to make it past warranty and not much further?

Yes, this is a radical suggestion, Such data is a closely held secret and is ‘competition sensitive’. That said, it is time to do something radical and if a key point in getting people to consider your vehicles is to convince them things really have changed, hard data stands at least a chance of working. The D3 need to convince people they are making reliable vehicles now. They don’t have the luxury of proving it over ten/twenty years.

Michael

Ford was always in a different situation from GM and Chrysler. From the beginning, it had no significant brand other than Ford. Thus, every new product of any importance was a Ford. Thunderbird. Falcon. Mustang. Taurus. Explorer. Expedition. By the 90s, Ford was a credible entrant in 95% of the market, from economy cars all the way to $45k Expeditions.

Toyota’s brand is no more than a well-deserved reputation. A single car company that started at the low end and grew to blanket all but the high end market. Always with quality. It then completed the process with Lexus. If Ford can slay the quality dragon (and it appears that it is at least moving in that direction) Ford can build a reputation/brand the same way. Ford’s advantage over its domestic competitors is that it is not saddled with so many useless “brands”.

In the 30s, GM’s multiple brands were the key to dominance. Today, the model is the Toyota/Lexus 2 brand approach. (Scion seems to me the beginning of the GMing of Toyota) Ford is closest to the modern standard of market coverage. Ford needs to do 3 things, none of them easy.
1. Quality, quality, quality. Not just the new car quality that makes you feel good in the showroom, but 150k mile quality for bodies, electronics and running gear (fwd transmissions, anyone?). This is why Toyota and Honda have such great resale and need comparative little discounting. This is where Ford needs to work hardest, as this has been its biggest problem area, in my view.
2. Product, product, product. Attractive, capable and high-content models in popular segments of the market will bring buyers. It’s all about value. This has traditionally been Ford’s strong suit, going back to the 60s.
3. Do something with Lincoln. Lexus started at scratch 20 years ago with a single top end model. Stop the GM style badge-engineering and develop a top-flight luxury sedan platform. Lincoln has done this before. Following the serial disasters that were Lincoln in the 1950s, FoMoCo designed a genuine luxury contender in 1961. This vehicle and its successor propelled Lincoln all through the 60s and 70s as a genuine leader in the class. The benchmarks have changed, but the task is the same.
So, forget the branding. Design and build the right cars, do it well, and the Ford and Lincoln brands will sparkle.

The US has a population of around 300 million. India has a population of about 1 billion.

Type [india population] into Google and you get 1.2 million hits. Enter ["united states" population] into Google, and you get 70.4 million hits.

As you can see, this misuse of “Google logic” would lead us to believe that the US has population of 59 billion people or that India has a population of 5 million, depending upon where you begin to make the mistake.

Using a count of Google hits proves nothing. Never, never use this argument for anything, other than to show that it makes no sense, as I have.

The Toyota sludge story is widely reported. It was an engineering error, no arguments there. Toyota handled it poorly, without a doubt.

But it has affected few vehicles. And the fact that the Detroit Defenders bring it up incessantly shows how little material that they have to work with.

If the only retort that the 2.8 fans have is to harp on one specific defect that affected just a few owners with one particular engine, then you know that the argument is poor.

Meanwhile, the exploding tires, gas tank barbeques, destructive DexCool and the rest are all blown off or swept under the rug. You would think from the commentary that engine sludge from a transplant is the only automotive defect that the world has ever seen, when we know better.

The perpetual “D” students don’t earn brownie points when the “A” student has a bad day. If you want to earn better grades, the product needs to improve. Hoping and praying that the other guy screws up is not much of a strategy.

So I’m hoping that someone in the know can explain what happened. For example, with respect to head gasket failure, I suppose the manufacturers may have tried cheaper gaskets, or didn’t machine the block and heads smooth enough, or hotter-running engines led to warping that stressed gaskets, or maybe some other factor.

It’s been said no one deliberately sets out to make a bad movie. Similarly, I’m sure Detroit wants happy customers. So how did it happen that, say, Chevy’s reputation is much worse than Toyota’s?

At this point, the Ford family has a much better reputation than any large financial institution. Plus, unlike the banks, Ford the company has drafted a reasonable and realistic turnaround plan.

Another important factor is that William Clay Ford, Jr., has good relations with both President-elect Obama and the UAW. If they don’t make any noise about the Ford family’s continued control of the company – and the UAW actually supports it – then I doubt that Congress will make much of a fuss over it.