Quote of the Day: He Who Laughs Last Edition

Robert Farago
by Robert Farago

I’ve often wondered why Ford hasn’t played-up the fact that it never suckled on Uncle Sam’s teat. Oh wait; what’s this? “ Ford gets $5.9 billion loan from Department of Energy“? Well, that doesn’t count, right? It’s not a bailout, right? Anyway, discretion is the better part of valor, they say. The day may come when Ford needs to exercise the line of federal credit they established around the time of Bailout V1. I guess it makes sense to let the media trumpet the “fact” that FoMoCo isn’t a ward of the state and leave it at that. So it was a complete surprise to see Ford slap down GM today, in a Detroit News article about the rush to put cars on lots post-Cash for Clunkers. “We knew that our inventories would be drawn down, so we planned increases. We factored that into our production schedule,” said George Pipas, head of sales analysis at the Dearborn automaker. “GM may have been more conservative. They’re now doing what we did a month ago.” Ouch! Could this be the start of some serious cross-town bitch-slapping? Probably not. Still, we can dream . . .

Robert Farago
Robert Farago

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  • Anonymous Anonymous on Sep 18, 2009
    What line of credit are you referring to? The 9.xxx billion that Ford asked for after taking a private jet to congress...
  • Bienville Bienville on Sep 18, 2009

    Remind us again how it's a bailout for Ford, but not for Nissan and Tesla. One thing I won't miss is your absolutely absurd hatred for all things Blue Oval.

  • Anonymous Anonymous on Sep 19, 2009

    NO ONE EVER said that it WASN'T a bailout for Nissan or Tesla. EVER!!!!! What RF was calling out was the blatant LIE that Ford keep reiterating..."We did NOT take ANY Govt. money". DOE = Govt. DOE money = Govt. money Taking DOE money = Taking Govt. money And yet...something so simple, and the cheerleaders cannot grasp that fact. Denial is not just a river in Africa.

  • Robert.Walter Robert.Walter on Sep 19, 2009

    This kind of "I'm better than him, he's dumber than me" dumb-ass commentary has been coming out of the Big-3 HQ for years ... and as long as it continues to, you'll see that the D3 are still hung-up on cross-town benchmarking rather than facing the harsh realities of ex-Detroit competition... Pipas has made other dumb forecasts and comments in the past, and here he just continues a well-accepted and long-standing Detroit tradition ...

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