So where were we? Oh yes. After wandering the earth (and working in a call center) for the first few months of 1995, I ended up at a very small Ford dealership located in the heart of Columbus, Ohio. On my first day, I was paired with another fellow who was also starting out at the dealership. I’ll call him… Rodney. He was an outgoing, cheerful thirty-one-year-old man who looked remarkably like the Colt 45-commercial-era Billy Dee Williams. Rodney was very interested in the dealership’s demo program, because he didn’t own a car. Every day he walked from his apartment a mile or so away, and every night he walked back home. The general manager took pity on him and broke the thirty-days-of-service-before-a-demo rule to put him in a Ranger Club Cab.

I started slowly at the dealership but by the time the 1996 model year rolled around I was regularly one of the top two or three guys on the board every month. More importantly, I was the most effective advocate in the shop for the Red Carpet Lease 24-month program. One month I moved 16 units and leased 14 of ’em. At least three of those were people I’d had to dissuade from writing me a check for the whole car on the spot. That’s right, I converted cash buyers to lessors. Why? There was a fifty-dollar spiff.

I was eventually rewarded for my performance by being permitted to order my own demo, just like the 55-year-old Brylcreemers who had been serving at the store since before ‘Nam. I knew exactly what I wanted. Start with a 1996 Thunderbird LX, black with beige interior. Add just three options: Compact disc player. Power Moonroof. And, most importantly, a 4.6 “mod motor”. The order was accepted at the factory. I was four weeks away from my ‘Bird. But Rodney had some other plans involving Ford’s aging coupe…
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If you scan the autoblogosphere on a regular basis, you’ve read some half-hearted eulogies to the best and worst of Mercury. Fair enough, as the Mercury brand deserves every one of those backhanded compliments: sharing too much content with a comparable Fords and (sometimes) sharing too many styling cues with the Lincolns means it couldn’t die off without a dig or two. And it is an easy target: aside from the (lead-sled) post war Yuppie clientele that inspired Mercury’s creation, the original sleeky-Sable and a few old Cougars, this was bound to happen.

But obviously my love for Mercury (here, here, and here) means I’m not going to bury Mercury, but to praise it. And to make sure the brand remains in our collective consciousness just as long as it’s GM counterpart, Pontiac. Wishful thinking, Mehta?

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The Detroit News is reporting that Ford has called a press conference on “brand and product strategy” for later today. It is widely believed that The Blue Oval will use the conference to announce the wind-down of its Mercury brand. Fresh updates as they occur...

UPDATE: The WSJ [sub] confirms that Ford’s board made the decision to axe Mercury. According to their sources, Ford “hopes to merge many of those dealers with existing Ford dealerships or shut them.”

UPDATE: Bloomberg BusinessWeek reports from the press conference, quoting Ford’s Mark Fields as saying

Given our improving financial situation, it really allows us to absorb the short-term cost of discontinuing Mercury… We’re very proud of Mercury’s history, but we’re now looking forward.

CNN Money confirms that the death of Mercury will mean more vehicles for Lincoln, as it paraphrases Ford’s Derrick Kuzack as saying:

Over the next several years, Lincoln will get seven all-new or drastically changed vehicles

Everyone loves an underdog story and none are greater than Ford’s. Their stock price went from $1 per share to nearly $12, they’re churning out good cars. their quality & reliability are increasing by the award. Yes, Ford is currently the golden boy of the car world. But what comes after pride? (Read More…)

Ford learns once again that partners can hurt as much as they help. Hat Tip: Twitter’s @SexCigarsBooze [via TTAC’s own @DYCWTC]

Mercury isn’t the only entry-luxury brand in free-fall… it’s just the worst of a beat-up bunch. We’ve included Lincoln to help illustrate Ford’s larger luxury-brand issues, and Buick and Acura for competing-brand comparison.

Bloomberg is reporting that anonymous sources tell them

[Ford’s] top executives are preparing a proposal to kill Mercury to be presented to directors in July

The rumor has yet to be confirmed, but the decision is clearly a sound one. We’ve written at length about Ford’s premium-brand problems, and Mercury is easily one of the weakest brands on the market. With Lincoln said to be going global, it makes plenty of sense to kill off Mercury. In fact, axing the purposeless entry-luxe brand might just be one of the single smartest moves Ford could make right now.

UPDATE via Twitter’s @davidshephardson(also of the Detroit News): “Mulally says he didn’t read Bloomberg report on Mercury. Says Ford has ‘nothing new to announce.'”

Ford is in-sourcing important parts of their hybrid-electric vehicles, and they are putting $135m behind the effort to bring the parts home and in-house. Currently, core parts are made abroad. Moving the making home to Michigan will create a whopping 170 jobs in Rawsonville and Van Dyke. But it’s a start. “I am proud of the tremendous success of the UAW and Ford in working together to keep good manufacturing jobs in the U.S.,” said Bob King, UAW vice president, National Ford Department. (Read More…)

About a half-hour after TTAC’s 15 Years of Compact Car Sales graph went up today, the normally enthusiast-oriented car blog Jalopnik gave the internet its own take on compact-car segment analysis with a post titled The Ford Fiesta Will Dominate The Small Car Segment. Some might question how this is supposed to jive with Jalopnik’s alleged commitment to “awesomeness,” but our concerns are far more prosaic. Examples: the absence of the Fiesta’s actual competitors like the Honda Fit, Nissan Versa and Toyota Yaris, and the absence of interior volume comparisons which would expose this “comparison” for the fraud it is. And that’s just for starters…

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As I exit Turn Eleven at Summit Point Raceway’s twisty, concrete-lined “Shenandoah” course, I’m confronted with a rare opportunity to put my money where my mouth has been. In a review of the 2011 Mustang GT 5.0, I perhaps foolishly opined that “C5 Z06 pilots will need to find a twisty road lest they be run nose-to-tail down long freeway sprints.” Now I’ve found myself fifty feet behind an enthusiastically-driven C5 Z06, and it’s squatting with full throttle up Shenandoah’s Bridge Straight. This will be a straight drag race, and for extra irony it’s going to occur on a road course. Four tires chirp. Sixteen cylinders sing. Forty to one hundred and ten miles per hour. Up a hill. Was I wrong? Can the mighty five-point-oh hunt for Corvettes?

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Ford’s Fiesta subcompact has earned a top EPA rating of 40 mpg on the highway, and 29 mpg in the city, reports Automotive News [sub]. Those numbers are for Fiestas equipped with an optional six-speed autobox; manual transmission models get a 37/28 mpg rating. By comparison, auto-equipped versions of competitors like the Honda Fit (35/28) and Toyota Yaris (35/29) come up short on highway mileage in particular. But this isn’t the first time Ford has claimed 40+ mpg for one of its cars: the Fusion hybrid carries an EPA city rating of 41 mpg, despite coming up short of its government-endorsed rating in several real-world tests (although not as shockingly as Chevy’s Equinox, for example). But the EPA testing regime is hardly perfect anyway, so let’s just wait and see what the test drives yield before we start stringing up the piñata.

Ford Europe will swallow a tried and trued antidote against flagging car sales: Heavy discounting. Yesterday, Ford had announced – in a rather roundabout way – that their European sales had dropped a breathtaking 17 percent in April. Putting cash on the hood is no surprising move. Wouldn’t there be another detail. (Read More…)

I guess, a lot of people at Ford European HQ are sorry of their “Europe’s biggest brand” rararah of last  month. There will be a lot of “eat your words” in Cologne. Or “eat a broom” as they say in Germany. Much less appetizing than eating words.  Ford’s sales numbers for April are horrible. (Read More…)

After four straight profitable quarters, Alan Mulally’s forecast today of a “solidly profitable” 2010 shouldn’t come as a huge surprise. But, as Executive Chairman Bill Ford put it to Ford shareholders at the company’s annual meeting [via AP],

It is the very early days in our recovery. We still have a lot of debt

And he’s not kidding. As of the end of Q1 2010, Ford was carrying $34b in debt. And though Ford faces a higher cost of borrowing because of its staggering debts, Bill Ford was clear that he wouldn’t trade places with Ford’s Detroit competitors, which cleaned out their balance books, at the expense of government bailouts and accompanying PR problems. After all, while GM and Chrysler were rebuilding, Ford managed to outperform both of them last year by gaining sales and market share. And Ford’s leadership sees that momentum carrying forward into next year.

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Threesomes can get burdensome to keep together. Didn’t we report in January that Ford, Mazda, and China’s Changan want to end the ménage-a-la-trois and forge their individual joint ventures? It was quickly dismissed as “speculation.” Just because it’s a speculation doesn’t mean that it won’t come true. (Read More…)