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Subject: "Ford To Stop Making Cars" Archived thread - Read only
 
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Mercutio
Member since May-26-13
942 posts
May-04-18, 00:29 AM (EDT)
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"Ford To Stop Making Cars"
 
   Okay, that headline was incendiary and misleading, but that's the job of headlines, innit?

More accurately: the Ford Motor Company has decided to stop making and selling, domestically here in the US, what most people envision when they think of a car: a sedan.

They will still make SUVs and trucks. They'll still make the Mustang, and a hatchback, budget version of the Focus that isn't even out yet.

But the Fiesta, the Focus, the Taurus (the Ford Taurus nameplate being retired! hard to conceive) the Fusion, the C-Max, all gone. If you own a Ford sedan right now, it is probably the last one you'll ever own.

This makes a certain amount of hardheaded economic sense. Ford is re-directing all of their R&D budget into SUVs, crossovers, and hybrids, which are projected to make up over half the US auto market by 2020 and that percentage is expected to only rise as time goes by.

Ford makes BANK on its SUVs and especially its trucks; the F-150 might as well be hauling the entire company on its bed. So this decision isn't transparently nutty; it might be the wrong one, but it also might be analogous to, say, bailing out of VCR production in 1999; you seem like an idiot except in five years you seem like a visionary. Cars are super expensive to develop and Ford might (or might not!) be making the right decision in bailing out of a market segment with the potential to go sideways on it.

It's still weird, tho. Ford is... well, it's Ford. The Ford Motor Company! It was founded by a disgusting human being and his heirs have been little better, but it is synonymous with the American car, and the American car, even in this day and age, is synonymous with the sedan. The sedan is generically car-shaped and it makes a car-shaped hole in our minds.

This is a strange time to be alive.

-Merc
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  Subject     Author     Message Date     ID  
  RE: Ford To Stop Making Cars Gryphonadmin May-04-18 1
     RE: Ford To Stop Making Cars Peter Eng May-04-18 2
         RE: Ford To Stop Making Cars Gryphonadmin May-04-18 3
     RE: Ford To Stop Making Cars Mercutio May-04-18 4

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Gryphonadmin
Charter Member
22375 posts
May-04-18, 02:19 AM (EDT)
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1. "RE: Ford To Stop Making Cars"
In response to message #0
 
   >This is a strange time to be alive.

It's going to get even stranger when governments and techbro oligarchs kill off proper motor vehicles altogether. :/

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.


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Peter Eng
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2045 posts
May-04-18, 12:51 PM (EDT)
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2. "RE: Ford To Stop Making Cars"
In response to message #1
 
   >
>It's going to get even stranger when governments and techbro oligarchs
>kill off proper motor vehicles altogether. :/
>

It's sad, but sort of inevitable; between a limited supply of dead prehistoric plants and animals, and the general problem of choking on the fumes of burning fossil fuels, it's the proper motor vehicles or the humans.

Peter Eng
--
Insert humorous comment here.


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Gryphonadmin
Charter Member
22375 posts
May-04-18, 01:40 PM (EDT)
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3. "RE: Ford To Stop Making Cars"
In response to message #2
 
   >It's sad, but sort of inevitable; between a limited supply of dead
>prehistoric plants and animals, and the general problem of choking on
>the fumes of burning fossil fuels, it's the proper motor vehicles or
>the humans.

There are days when I prefer the proper motor vehicles.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.


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Mercutio
Member since May-26-13
942 posts
May-04-18, 04:55 PM (EDT)
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4. "RE: Ford To Stop Making Cars"
In response to message #1
 
   >>This is a strange time to be alive.
>
>It's going to get even stranger when governments and techbro oligarchs
>kill off proper motor vehicles altogether. :/

To be fair, it must have been equally strange for the people who grew up during our transition from not-cars to cars. My great-grandmother (1904-1996, she hung in there) was such a person. That must have been super weird, especially for folks in cities who were told "no, you can't walk in the street anymore; in fact, we're declaring that that's a kind of crime. Streets be for cars now, not for you."

Speaking for myself, I have a lot of affection for proper motor vehicles, but at the very least the time has probably come to stop massively, crazily subsidizing them. We've tried that for nearly a century and the results have been... mixed.

I worry about the techbro oligarch side of things because, frankly, those guys are arrogant. A lot of them got rich and powerful because they were so unspeakably lucky as to be the ones who solved fairly basic programming problems in a context where that meant they could cash in big, and they all think they're as smart as Vint Cerf or Grace Hopper because of it. They don't respect caution, and they don't respect technology. (They FETISHIZE it; that's different.)

At some point one of them is going to talk society at large into implementing something that just isn't ready to go yet in a context where the consequence is less "identity theft" and more "many people die."

-Merc
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