#FordMotorCompany

Anyone hoping to glean specifics about upcoming products during Ford Motor Company’s annual shareholder’s meeting likely walked away unsatisfied. During the Thursday meeting, the company’s leaders touted Ford’s plan to freshen its lineup and align its products with changing American tastes.

Killing off the Fiesta, Focus, Fusion, and Taurus was necessary, CEO Jim Hackett claimed, adding that the decision doesn’t mean the company plans to leave those buyers in the lurch.

“We want to give them what they’re telling us they really want,” he said. “We’re simply reinventing the American car.”

Ford recently announced the elimination of the traditional car from its North American lineup. Within two or three model years, no four-door Ford will be available with a trunk. No Fusion, no Focus, no Fiesta, no Taurus. The demand-driven logic behind the decision is clear. Cars have declined from 35 percent of Ford sales as recently as 2012, to 23 percent last year.

The company does not report profitability by nameplate, but we can safely assume their declining contribution to net income has been even more dramatic. So Ford’s decision was predictable, if seemingly dispassionate. Less predictably, a relatively healthy automaker is executing a long-term strategic shift. In public. Before the market forced it to.

Herein lies the real story.

There’s been much made about Ford’s secret/not-so-secret plan to purchase a major chunk of Detroit’s Corktown neighborhood, including its greatest landmark — the monstrous, long-abandoned Michigan Central Station. Until now, however, the only words we had to go on were whispered by sources who preferred to keep their names out of the media.

Thankfully, Edsel B. Ford II decided to pipe up today.

The biggest automotive news story of the last week was Ford’s decision to abandon almost all passenger cars in the North American market. Whether you think it’s a smart business decision as consumers shift toward crossovers or a colossal misstep, you were probably envisioning a gradual phase-out as the company bolsters its domestic truck and SUV lineup for 2022. Well, you thought wrong, because Focus production ends this May.

Fortunately, you’ll have a little more time to snag a Taurus or Fiesta before those models are also killed off. Taurus assembly is slated to end in March of 2019, with the Fiesta murdered a couple of months later. After that, you’ll be stuck with whatever dealers have left on the lot and the venerable Mustang coupe. Americans will also have access to a Focus Active imported from China. But it’s as much crossover as it is hatchback, doesn’t start importing until the middle of 2019, and won’t be available in Canada at all.

Officially, there’s more than 220 Ford Motor Company employees ready to move into a refurbished former factory on Michigan Avenue in Detroit’s Corktown district sometime this year. A nice little burst of employment for a long-neglected, now-resurgent neighborhood, but it might be just the beginning.

The automaker is reportedly in talks with numerous property owners to create a campus totalling at least 1.1 million square feet, with the towering — and famously abandoned — Michigan Central Station as its anchor.

Beneath the recently unveiled next-generation Ford Focus is an architecture that stands to proliferate through the Ford ranks, underpinning models as large as the Ford Edge.

While American consumers won’t see the new Focus until the latter half of 2019, well after buyers in Europe and China (where the U.S.-bound model will be built), the unnamed platform, which barely got any type of billing during the model’s reveal, stands to bring Ford’s front-drive vehicles into the third decade of the 20th century.

China got a headstart in the “countries with over a billion people who suddenly love owning a car” race, but India’s trying its best to catch up.

With a growing pool of consumers ready and willing to hand over cash for a car, Ford Motor Company knows partnering with a local company that knows the lay of the land is a speedier and cheaper route to profits, so last year it formed an alliance with Mahindra Group. You know Mahindra — the company currently building a retro Jeep-shaped ATV for nostalgic Americans.

This week, the two companies further consummated their bond by signing off on the joint development of SUVs.

Detroit’s skyline-defining riverfront Renaissance Center is better known to car enthusiasts as the RenCen, home to General Motors, which has owned the seven tower complex for more than 20 years. Less well known is the fact that the RenCen was the brainchild of Henry Ford II. Shocked by the aftermath of the 1967 riot that devastated many Detroit businesses, the Deuce, as Henry Ford’s grandson was known, saw the RenCen as means of revitalizing the city’s economy. Construction began in 1971 and the facility opened in the summer of 1976. By then, however, the domestic auto industry was hit with the 1973 OPEC oil embargo just as it was struggling to meet new federal emissions and safety standards. Car guys call it the “Malaise Era,” and it was the start of four decades of decline of the Motor City.

That decline, however, genuinely appears to have finally bottomed out. Class A commercial real estate is in high demand downtown and commercial development is spreading to other areas of the city. Unemployment in Wayne County, Detroit’s home, is down to just 4.5 percent, compared to 17.4 percent in 2009.

Now, almost 50 years after Henry Ford II envisioned the RenCen as reviving Detroit, comes word that the car company with his name over the door may well revive and restore one of the most iconic images of Detroit’s decline.

The future is electric, industry leaders tell us, but it will also have room for cargo. Lots and lots of it.

In announcing its near-future product plans on Thursday, Ford Motor Company promised the replacement of “more than 75 percent of its current portfolio” by 2020, with sport utility vehicles filling the sales void created by declining car volume. By the start of the next decade, only 14 percent of sales will come from cars, Ford predicts.

Meanwhile, at Lincoln, there’s good reason to believe the automaker’s luxury brand might enter the coming decade completely carless.

Ford wants to be seen as a nimble, responsive automaker, quick to adapt to changing market trends, so today the automaker dumped a pile of product information on our heads.

Some of the vehicles Ford confirmed today were already known, like the upcoming Shelby GT500 super Stang, Ford Explorer ST, and hybrid versions of the Mustang and F-150. What we didn’t know until today was that the reborn Bronco, due out in 2020, will receive an electrified powertrain. Nor were we aware that it won’t arrive alone.

Ford’s calling the Bronco’s smaller companion the “Off-Road Small Utility” for now, but “Mini Bronco” sounds better to our ears.

Ford Motor Co. will be temporarily laying off roughly 2,000 hourly employees at its Michigan Assembly and Stamping Plants in May so it can begin retooling the site’s facilities for production of the 2019 Ford Ranger and 2020 Ford Bronco. The location will be idled for roughly five months and Ford wants to make it very clear that these are temporary layoffs.

The automaker said in a notice in compliance with the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act that all affected employees will either return to the plant in October or transfer to another factory. Ford also said it would be ending production of the Focus sedan and C-Max on May 7th.

It has begun. Ford is finally ready to launch another batch of its faux-autonomous Domino’s pizza delivery vehicles to assess how people will interact with a self-driving vehicle. False autonomy has become a bit of a gimmick with Ford, but a necessary one. Last year, it disguised a man as a seat to assess how people would respond to a vehicle that only communicated using lights. Now it’s running with a similar strategy in a deal with the famous pizza chain, adding Postmates for good measure.

While the information gleaned from the endeavor is less important, the fact that Ford is already actively working with business partners on autonomous applications is what really matters. It’s laying the groundwork for future business opportunities.

However, if you’re worried that Ford’s pretend self-driving vehicles are a sign that it’s losing the race toward the self-driving car, don’t. In addition to the Domino’s car, the automaker is also launching blue-and-white research vehicles equipped with new self-driving hardware and software technology from Argo AI.

Yesterday’s shocking ouster of Raj Nair as president of Ford North America, which came after an internal investigation into “inappropriate behavior,” left a leadership vacuum at the highest levels of the company’s food chain. On Thursday morning, the automaker announced a successor: Kumar Galhotra, soon-to-be former Lincoln Motor Company boss and Ford chief marketing officer.

Galhotra, 52, has overseen Lincoln since 2014, but his new role will see him pulling all the levers of Ford’s North American business.

Not to be outdone by General Motors’ excursion into autonomy, Ford Motor Company has announced it will purchase two mobility startups: Autonomic, which makes self-driving software; and TransLoc, which makes transit apps.

While Ford says it made a significant investment into the California-based Autonomic last year, it’s now rolling the company into a new team for developing mobility business models called “Ford X.”

This is familiar territory, as the Blue Oval also promised to put around $1 billion into Argo AI last year. The artificial intelligence startup is supposed to help Detroit automaker develop a “virtual driver system” for future autonomous fleets. But will the company’s strategy of acquiring businesses work as it hopes to reshape itself into a different kind of carmaker? Ford thinks so.

Despite posting a 7 percent increase in revenue and a net income of $2.4 billion (up from a $800 million loss a year ago), Ford’s fourth-quarter 2017 earnings missed analyst expectations. Blame a few key factors.

First, Ford faced an increase in commodity prices, ratcheting up the cost of steel and aluminum. Add to that increased warranty costs, unpleasant foreign exchange rates, and sinking sales in China, and the company’s pretax profit fell 19 percent from a year ago, hitting $1.7 billion.

As the company seeks to convince investors to put its trust in the automaker’s vision, Ford delivered earnings of 39 cents per share, not the 42 cents analysts projected.