I am sometimes amazed that the kind of stuff that comes out of Detroit.
I am referring to the level of stupidity/ineptitude.
Example: Ford just brought back the Taurus brand after dumping it in favor of the Five Hundred.
Apparently, someone at Ford finally realized that successful Japanese car companies do not change model names every few years. Duh!!
Japanese companies stick to the Civic, Accord, Camry and Corolla year after year. Perhaps the first few models were not perfect. But in typical Japanese fashion, Toyota and Honda kept plugging away patiently. And now, Toyota is fighting head to head with GM to become the biggest automotive company in the world. I am driving a Honda and will be canceling my GM Card.
So my question to the folks at Ford is “Where the **beep** have you guys been?”
Hatchbacks are making a comeback.
The Mazda3 hatchback is selling like hotcakes and making Mazda a zoom-zoom brand again.
The Mini is as popular as ever. Even Dodge has got into it with the Caliber. There is Volvo with the C30, Suzuki with the Reno and SX4, Nissan with the Versa, various Scions, the VW Rabbit and performance variants, Saturn Astra and the Chevy Aveo. Even the new Subaru Impreza is styled like a hatchback (instead of a wagon).
What is Ford doing about that?
Well, Ford canceled the Focus ZX3 and ZX5 and rolled out a …. drum roll…. coupe….
That was several years after they had decided that coupes were really bad sellers.
Don’t forget that Ford contributed to the new found popularity of the performance hatchbacks with the original ZX3. The first ZX3 had exceptional handling and packed a higher performance ZETEC engine. Then Ford did one better with the Focus SVT. A huge aftermarket sprang up offering everything from turbochargers to suspension upgrades.
So why did Ford drop the ball on the segment it helped re-vitalize?
My suspicion is that we have a bunch of guys at Ford who are not car guys. These are people who do not have a gut feel for the products they sell. They are unable to view cars the way their customers see the cars.
We see this in Silicon Valley all the time: engineers who work to earn salary. They do not understand the technologies they are wielding. They do not have any passion in what they are doing. They are not interested in technology. Period.
So CEO Mulally has a big job in his hands.
The way to get Ford out of its current mess is to make products that customers want to buy. In order to make products that customers want to buy, the company needs to understand who the customers are. The cancellation of the Focus hatchbacks shows that the company does not understand and apparently does not want to understand.
As long as Ford continues in this brand/product merry-go-round, it is not going any where.
[...] a previous article, I moaned about how Ford was missing the market by eliminating the Focus ZX3 and ZX5 hatchbacks [...]