Posted on 04/22/2003 7:32:35 AM PDT by Timesink
Selling a $40,000 car through the Ford channel may have also hurt the Thunderbird, which was far more expensive than its high-volume predecessor. Ford dealers have been successful selling $35,000 to $45,000 trucks but have little experience selling automobiles in the near-luxury price range. If there was a marketing effort by Ford Motor, I wasn't aware of it. Naturally, sales didn't meet expectations.
I think these two paragraphs touch on the real problems: Less than stellar quality coupled with a price tag way too high. The execs at Ford are missing the things that sell cars. For a company that tries to tell us that "Quality is job 1", there is no excuse for quality problems. If the quality isn't there, no one will pay $40K for any car, and if you want to sell a decent quantity of cars, the price should be about half that.
The way you recover your production and development cost is to sell a lot of cars and recoup the costs that way, over time, rather than to try to recover the costs up front by overcharging for the car. Makes me wonder what these yo-yo's learned in business school...do they even know how Captitalism works? Most people I know will not buy a new model in it's first or second year of production, simply because there will be bugs that need to be worked out and fixed. I know I wouldn't spend that much money on a new design. Why should I pay for the "priviledge" of being, in effect, a road tester for their cars? Ford should realize that this model can and will be successful if they will commit to two things: make the quality first-rate, and keep it in production long enough to gain the buyers, like me, who will wait until year 3 or 4 of the production run to buy one, after the quality is where it should be. If Henry Sr. were alive today, he'd smack every one of the Ford execs up 'side their heads and tell them to grow a brain!
It wasn't a success because it only sold 19,000 instead of 25,000? Did it ever occur to them that the original estimate might have been a little optimistic, especially in the beginnings of the Clinton recession? Duh! I wouldn't call sales of 19,000 a failure! If they only sold 19, or 190, or 1900, yes, that could be classified as a failure. I honestly don't think that the Ford execs are all that smart when it comes to average car buyers. They think they can tell us what we will like (Does the Edsel ring any bells?), but it is us who tell them what they should build!
With all do respect to your previous vette's, the C5 is a different animal entirely. I've owned a '79, '85 and a '90 vette and they can not begin to compare with the C5. And besides, vettes are american made my patriot friend.
http://members.roadfly.com/jason/AMS103.htm
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