The Detroit News is reporting that the company that electrifies Ford’s Transit Connect Electric vans, Azure Dynamics, AZD, has filed for bankruptcy and suspended the production of the small battery electric van. Azure Dynamics announced that 120 employees, including 50 at their Oak Park facility just outside Detroit where AZD performed the conversions, have been laid off. So far about 500 Transit EVs have been made since late 2010. There is no word if the company will be able to restart production.
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Tag: Ford
Iraq hasn’t had anything noteworthy in the automotive space since the Iraqi Taxi debacle of the 1980’s, but with a population larger than Saudi Arabia, substantial oil reserves and increasing stability, Iraq is becoming a new target for automakers eager to sell cars to a population that’s been barred from Western vehicles due to international sanctions.
Dan R writes:
Hello Sajeev,
I have a transmission related question that I was hoping you may be able to assist me with. I have a 2003 Mustang GT, 4.6, Auto. 110k. (3rd owner) The car has the occasional classic Ford “AOD trans shudder” at lower RPM under load.
It does not really affect the overall drivability of the car but is an annoyance and I’d like to take care of it. As far as I know this car has never had a trans service done. I’ve heard mixed reviews on weather to do a trans flush or not. (Read More…)
The early-90s Escort GT was a decently fast car for its day, but Escorts were always such disposable cars that you seldom see any of these semi-goofy-looking GTs these days, on the street or in the junkyard. Here’s an example that I found in a Denver self-service yard last week. (Read More…)
We get all kinds of silly and nonsensical emails at our TTAC inboxes, but when they come from a major OEM, it’s always a little more entertaining. Check out this absurd release from Ford, boasting the 2013 Escape’s towing prowess.
Contrary to initial reports, Ford CEO Alan Mulally told Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail that the Ford B-Max MPV will be coming to North America after all.
While both General Motors and Chrysler are putting their money on Compressed Natural Gas options for their pickup-truck lineups, Ford is going with pretty much everything but CNG as it examines alternative fuel strategies for future vehicles – and for now, the 3.5L Ecoboost V6 will be the standard bearer for light duty versions of the Ford F-Series.
Ford’s revised F-Series Super Duty was announced today, and aside from the giant chrome grille, the big news here is a revamped MyFord Touch system – now available with knobs and buttons in addition to the touch screen.
Ford is launching a reality TV show dubbed *groan* Escape Routes, which will run for 6 weeks on NBC’s 8 P.M. Saturday night slot and on mun2 (a Hispanic network) at 11 P.M, starting on March 31st. Participants will ostensibly drive around in the 2013 Escape as overly dramatic music and poorly scripted lines spew forth. As if the concept weren’t nauseating enough, participants on the show will apparently interact with fans of the show online to “tap into the fabric of the local culture”.
There was a time, let’s say in the late 1980s, when the quantity of Pintos in junkyards went from “glut” to “famine,” as if a switch was flipped and all the Pintos just disappeared. The same thing happened with the early Hyundai Excel, too, only they lived, died, and got scrapped within a five-year period versus the 10-to-15-year period for the Pinto. Still, every so often I find a lone Pinto that hung on an extra couple of decades before getting junked. For example, this tan ’74 that showed up in a Denver self-service yard last month. (Read More…)
Can we just get this in a five-door? Even though Fiesta sales aren’t as great as Ford would hope, I quite like this ST version.
An Automotive News story today reported on an incredible – dare I say, game changing – method of corporate governance over at Ford; swearing at, and attempting to physically attack your co-workers!
We’re still waiting to get the final February sales numbers on all automakers, but one emerging story is that the Ford Focus has finally outsold its domestic rival, the Chevrolet Cruze.
Throughout 2011 and January 2012, the Cruze led the Focus, with the Chevy beating the Ford last year by a substantial margin (231, 860 units for the Cruze versus 175,709 for the Focus). Last month the Cruze did 15,049 units versus 14,440 for the Focus. This month, independent analyst Timothy Cain is reporting that the Focus finally bested the Cruze. Chevrolet moved 20,427 Cruzes versus 23,350 for the Blue Oval’s small car.
Ford is touting a 115 percent year-over-year gain for the Focus, having sold 10,879 Foci in February 2011, but their fleet percentage back then, according to TrueCar, was just 1.6 percent.. One year later, it’s closer to 20 percent. February wasn’t even over when Ford started sending out press releases claiming that Focus sales are on pace to double this month compared to February of 2011. With reports of Ford Focus fleet sales hovering around 45 percent, we thought that it would be worthwhile to look at the fleet/retail breakdown for the Focus and Cruze in 2011, as a means of providing a bit of context . (Read More…)
We didn’t get to go to the World Mobile Congress in beautiful Barcelona, Spain, but it may have been nice to catch both the unveiling of the Ford B-Max and a keynote speech given by Bill Ford, executive chairman of Ford Motor Co. Ford (the man, not the company) outlined an overarching vision for helping manage the estimated 2 billion cars that will be on the road by 2050.
To gather the photographs for the Junkyard Find series, I do a lot of walking around self-service wrecking yards, and mostly I’m just tuning out the common cars as background noise. You know, the 15-to-20-year-old Detroit stuff that won’t have any collector value until almost all are gone (as happened with the Pinto and Vega). The chaff. Right now, the Taurus/Sable is king of the Ford sections of these yards (I counted 188 of them in a 300-car section in a California yard not long ago), but you also see large numbers of Tempos and Topazes. Once I decided to pay attention to the lowly Tempo, I was surprised by the number of not-particularly-trashed examples I found at my local yard. Today, and just today, let’s pay attention to one of the most common vehicles in American self-serve junkyards today: the Tempo. (Read More…)
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