I’ve often wondered why Ford hasn’t played-up the fact that it never suckled on Uncle Sam’s teat. Oh wait; what’s this? “Ford gets $5.9 billion loan from Department of Energy“? Well, that doesn’t count, right? It’s not a bailout, right? Anyway, discretion is the better part of valor, they say. The day may come when Ford needs to exercise the line of federal credit they established around the time of Bailout V1. I guess it makes sense to let the media trumpet the “fact” that FoMoCo isn’t a ward of the state and leave it at that. So it was a complete surprise to see Ford slap down GM today, in a Detroit News article about the rush to put cars on lots post-Cash for Clunkers. “We knew that our inventories would be drawn down, so we planned increases. We factored that into our production schedule,” said George Pipas, head of sales analysis at the Dearborn automaker. “GM may have been more conservative. They’re now doing what we did a month ago.” Ouch! Could this be the start of some serious cross-town bitch-slapping? Probably not. Still, we can dream . . .
The day may come when Ford needs to exercise the line of federal credit they established around the time of Bailout V1.
What line of credit are you referring to?
Ford just needs to keep its mouth shut as it’s won the PR battle for being the “most purely American” car company. Lots of people who vowed never to buy a furrin’ car, have written off GM and Chryco and by default have become Ford customers for the forseeable long-term.
Never mind that the GM/Chryco aid preserved Ford’s supplier base. Never mind that Ford builds one of its most popular line of cars in Hermosillo, Sonora. Never mind that Ford is a global car company who sells a lot of cars to “socialist” furrinrs.
Cognitive dissonance reigns supreme!
Ford could also say ” We restructured our finances in 2007 two years ago thus avoiding a bailout, while GM did nothing thus needed to get a bailout.” Double bitch-slap.
slateslate :Lots of people who vowed never to buy a furrin’ car, have written off GM and Chryco and by default have become Ford customers for the forseeable long-term.
If your thought process excludes all foreign makes on general principle, it probably is not sophisticated enough to evaluate the ramifications of buying from a recently C11’ed automaker.
Meanwhile, can I float $5.9B for a year? If I can just stick it somewhere that returns 0.1% better than the interest I have to pay, in one year I’ll have enough cash to retire. After taxes are taken out of my earnings.
OT, but are you actually leaving? I thought it was your site. We need a thread on this, or do we just have to go over to autoblog to discuss…
All the companies who are now buildin’ inventory back up are gonna be buttoning those plants back up in a month or two…maybe sooner! The 4th quarter is historically seldom a good quarter for car sales….no iron moves between Halloween and New Year’s Day….and with C4C sucking much of 2009’s demand into last month, the sales outlook for autos for the rest of 2009 and early 2010 looks positively…..glacial.
But, it is all about absorbing fixed costs into inventory, so they wanna build while they can to make the 3rd Quarter numbers look good.
In other words, not much has changed anywhere. The short-term, make-the-quarter, worry-about-inventory-bloat-next-year mindset hasn’t gone away yet…..some things never change!
Bye Robert. It’s been fun!
http://www.autoblog.com/2009/09/18/breaking-robert-farago-leaving-the-truth-about-cars
I wonder if the TTAC begin slowly dying now (are the others still involved as fed up as RF and also looking for the exit?)
The topic of the Detroit News article is completely unrelated to the bailouts. The jab at Ford about the DOE loan is way out of left field, not to mention childish.
Sad to be told that RF is leaving. Wish that he could have broken the bad news here first.
Laughing? I’m crying. First my girlfriend kicks me to the curb, then Farago lets me down. Man oh man! Roll the tape of the good times, please.
It could be worse – Ford could pull a GM or Chrysler. Oh wait, the idea here is that are/will. Yay.
# FloorIt :
September 18th, 2009 at 1:28 pm
Ford could also say ” We restructured our finances in 2007 two years ago thus avoiding a bailout, while GM did nothing thus needed to get a bailout.” Double bitch-slap.
In addition to restructuring their finances while economic conditions were good, Ford also invested in improvements to their core Ford brand product line while selling off foreign luxury brands. Quadruple bitch-slap? When they came to Washington D.C, they were already executing a fairly credible restructuring plan. Too bad Ford has to compete with taxpayer subsidized zombie companies. If Ford ends up needing a loan, it will really be a loan, not a bailout.
What line of credit are you referring to?
The 9.xxx billion that Ford asked for after taking a private jet to congress…
Remind us again how it’s a bailout for Ford, but not for Nissan and Tesla. One thing I won’t miss is your absolutely absurd hatred for all things Blue Oval.
NO ONE EVER said that it WASN’T a bailout for Nissan or Tesla.
EVER!!!!!
What RF was calling out was the blatant LIE that Ford keep reiterating…”We did NOT take ANY Govt. money”.
DOE = Govt.
DOE money = Govt. money
Taking DOE money = Taking Govt. money
And yet…something so simple, and the cheerleaders cannot grasp that fact. Denial is not just a river in Africa.
This kind of “I’m better than him, he’s dumber than me” dumb-ass commentary has been coming out of the Big-3 HQ for years … and as long as it continues to, you’ll see that the D3 are still hung-up on cross-town benchmarking rather than facing the harsh realities of ex-Detroit competition…
Pipas has made other dumb forecasts and comments in the past, and here he just continues a well-accepted and long-standing Detroit tradition …