P-26 Busisness in denial... FORD... History repeating but CEO's dummer than ever...

How Ford starved its Taurus
In the 1980s, the Ford Motor Co. was in deep trouble. It made too many gas guzzlers and was getting clobbered by the Japanese. It responded with the Taurus, an innovative design that would become the best-selling car in America.

In 2006, the Ford Motor Co. is in deep trouble. It is making too many gas guzzlers and is getting clobbered by the Japanese. It is responding by discontinuing the Taurus, a once innovative design that used to be the best-selling car in America.... Go figure.

Ford is pulling the plug on the Taurus ostensibly as part of a grand effort to remake a company that is losing money, including a breathtaking $5.8 billion in the most recent quarter alone. But the real reason is that it has been starving the Taurus for the past decade. The once-groundbreaking vehicle - sales peaked around 410,000 in 1992 - no longer has the strength to compete.

While competitors such as the Toyota Camry and Honda Accord are constantly improved and updated, Ford has tweaked the Taurus once since the 1996 model year, when it received its last major makeover.

In the ensuing years Ford, like GM, largely ceded the sedan market and concentrated on large SUVs and pickups with hefty profit margins that masked their biggest problem - uncompetitive labor costs driven by sky-high health care benefits for employees and retirees...... Those road hogs have fallen out of favor with higher gasoline prices, putting Detroit in a difficult spot. The Taurus, meanwhile, has fallen out of favor because Ford made sure that it did....

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I decided to put this piece in here as business also has a political side to it.. It's interesting to see how the mind set at Ford is similar to the mind set of Government and how history just keeps repeating itself but this time with a twist... Instead of Ford scraping their AMERICAN MADE dinosaur SUV's and focusing on small, safe and efficient and practical cars... they do the opposite... Twenty-five years ago Ford pulled its ass out of the fire.. this time they are sticking their heads up their ass..... or is there really a difference...

I can remember oil prices rising in the mid 70's and then again the big jump in 1980/81 with the trouble between Iraq and Iran and then in 1990 with the Gulf war... and now our current state..

Anyway... the point I was going to make was that in the early 1980's The American and Canadian governments gave the auto-makers tax incentives and signed agreements with them, giving them until the 1995 to build (((ALL))) passenger vehicles with pollution free engines that delivered no less that 28 mpg in the city.....Air, water and soil pollution were also on the agenda with a millennium deadline... Well 1995 and 2000 has come and gone along with any memory of those agreements.. and instead, things are even worse. and everything old is NEW again... "Praise the Lord.. we have change" even though it's only a form change and will last only as long as it takes the masses to forget...

You can tell that I'm a little ticked off this morning... eh? I even got a little dig on phoney religious beliefs in there too.

Saysame JR

PS: Here is our CANADIAN governments "NEW" agenda on cleaning up our environment... It's not even the same shit they said 25 years ago... and didn't act ob.... Now they are saying that they are not going to be making a decision for another 25 years... Dah!!!!... '06 Oct 19 Canada won't set emissions targets before 2020/25

UPDATES:
'06 Oct 25 Wed Most car brands 'failing on CO2'

'06 Nov 06 Canada raises Kyoto eyebrows by killing EU summit OTTAWA (Reuters) - Prime Minister Stephen Harper has ruffled some European feathers by putting off a bilateral summit with the European Union that was just weeks away.

Critics at home said the Conservative prime minister was simply trying to avoid European pressure to respect Ottawa's commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions under the Kyoto Protocol, which Harper says Canada will not be able to meet... "It's very bad international relations strategy by the prime minister," Jack Layton, head of the leftist New Democratic Party (NDP), told Reuters.

Harper's office denied the decision had anything to do with Kyoto and everything to do with his desire, as the head of a minority government, to spend as much time in Ottawa as possible.... "He's committed to governing the country," Harper spokeswoman Carolyn Stewart-Olsen said. "It's all about the day-to-day aspects of governing the country."...

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Yep that's Harper!!!... your typical day to day kind of guy... looking out for HIS best interests... Definately not a leader or a man of vision...

Saysame JR
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