Hopefully they’ll bring over the fantastic Mazda2/Fiesta and start kicking some ass in the sub-compact market (the only legitimate competitor for this car is the Fit Sport).

And now they just need to ditch Volvo.

Mind you, I actually really like the car. And I say this after the fact that I agree with what a lot of TTAC has to say.

Toyota Worldwide

Oh, wait,
That was easy…

Feb data is the latest, though. Looks like their overseas sales are much bigger than domestic sales but production is fairly close to 50/50.

Honda-Acura’s sales through Q1 were 353k. FLM’s were 547k. Ford’s estimated retail was about 357k. Even if Honda is 100% retail (which it isn’t – fleet sales were up 200% last year to about 5% of total sales), FLM is still above Honda.

That is correct. Cash flow (money received during the course of business) is not the same thing as profit (an event that creates value in excess of cost.)

Jag and Land Rover were sold for less than they paid for it. Ford will post a loss for this, not a gain.

Do you know for a fact that the initial investment in those two companies has already been written off? If not, the sale will causes losses, not gains. When you sell something for less than you paid for it that normally is called a loss, not a gain.

Buy a house for $500k, sell it a few years later for $300k, you lost $200k. The $300k sales price is not a profit.

I do hope that they are actually still engineering and designing some vehicles here in the US…my only problem with Ford now is that they are practically cutting away all their American jobs and products and replacing them with foreign Fords (Flex-Canada, Edge-Canada, Fusion-Mexico, Fiesta-probably Mexico (via Germany), Transit-Turkey(??)), etc. It seems their only American vehicles are the large trucks. And this is at a time that the collapse of the dollar is making US manufacturing attractive.

At least GM still does employ actual American engineers for their Lambdas, CTS, GMT900’s, and some of their other most successful and best products.

But as I pointed out in my post yesterday, we don’t even have April numbers yet. How do we know their marketshare? They were stable through Q1 – down like 0.1 point. That’s all we know so far.

The market is down but their market share is nearly stable lately,

So there’s stable, nearly stable and nearly stable lately? Not so sure. This from yesterday’s post on the Volvo sale…

“FoMoCo’s market share dropped from 15.1 percent at the end of 2006, to 14.2 percent at the end of 2007, to 13 percent this April.”

Kill Merc and sell Volvo and when (not if) the dead cat bounce from one of the others comes Mullaly will look like a genius (shoot, may be he is) and a bargain at twice the price.

I hope soon I can stop refuring to the Debt 3. It will be Ford and the Debt Duo (or Uno, or just a historic footnote, sigh).

Go Big Al!

Bunter

That SUV photo – that’s damned ugly.

I disagree. And I LOVE the way the current Explorer drives. Why Ford stopped promoting this vehicle is beyond me. Surely when sales are tanking they should be advertising it MORE, not less.

Just sayin’.

We’re smack dab in the middle of a lame duck presidential year where a new one will be taking over after an 8 year term. We saw similar things happen when Clinton was in his last year, but this time energy prices are considerably higher than when he was in office, not to mention the financial sector really collapsing.

That SUV photo – that’s damned ugly. Since this is a rare bit of good news for Ford, could we get a picture of something better looking to go along with it? Or at least post a pic of the Denali XT concept so that the Ford will look good by comparison.

I would repeat that I am impressed that Ford had such a small loss in North America (what is that, like $15 per vehicle sold?) when the market is down 8%. Ford is really starting to get a handle on their fixed costs.

If the housing market comes back in the fall when the new F-150 comes out, Ford may be well positioned. Who’d a thunk it?