Originally posted by baco99:
{yawn} wake me up when Ford designs something interesting...

no offense to you, thanks for the post, but the bigger news is Ford's 46% drop in sales from 2005 to 2006. a boring coupe ain't gonna help THAT situation!



46%? Where in the world did you get that?

Try less than 10% YTD. I think you might be quoting the sales decline of the F-Series, which is down 46% compared to July of '05 but only down 12% YTD.

Sales of the Fusion/Milan/Zephyr were up almost 20% over June. Mustang sales were up 30% over last July.

Total Ford car sales were up 7% over last year, not significantly lower than Toyota car sales. Ford is more than holding their own in the car market with their new products. It's the truck market that's screwing them over. That and the significant sales decline of the Focus. If Ford could get a new Focus here, one that even just held the sales of the current one last year, rather than losing it, Ford's car sales would be up well over 10% for the year.

More importantly, despite lower sales volume, Ford is making a larger margin on every car sold. Month-to-Month comparisons yield strong declines (as in the case of the F-Series) because last year Ford was forced to give them away in response to the General's 'employee pricing' scheme, not because the product isn't stronger. Ford's margins are increasing on better relative market strength compared to last year.

The news is once again not telling the entire story. The news all over today is that Japanese companies are posting huge month-over-month gains while Americans are posting similarly huge declines, making it look like there was some huge catalyst to make people buy Japanese all of a sudden. It has everything to do with last year's marketing crap that everyone knew was going to bite them in the ass this year. It was completely expected, to those with even a modicum of intelligence anyhow, that this Summer would look like this. It's not that everyone is now buying Japanese, it's that everyone isn't buying American like they were last year because they're not giving cars away like they were.

2003 Mazda6s 3.0L MTX Webpage 2004 Mazda3s 2.3L ATX