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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   26188 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 18, 2024

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I will have to research that. I know Chrysler was at the end, but I'd be surprised with regards to Ford. They sold many millions of sedans in the 90s and 2000s.

They sold many millions of sedans in the 90s and 2000s.

Honestly, the same was true of Chevrolet; they were making six-digit (as in, 100-200 thousand) sales of their compact sedans at the time.

They aren't actually bad cars, it's just that the early-90s through mid-00s Hondas and Toyotas were objectively the best cars ever made and that bought them customers for life, even though Civics and Corollas now cost twice what they used to (and are 1.5x as large).
Meanwhile, Gen Z buys Korean, and they're even more unreliable than mid-00s Big Three cars because their engines go before 100,000 miles due due to incompetence (machining chips not cleared properly kills the normal engines) and premature cost-cutting (undersized rods flying through the blocks of turbocharged engines). Detroit-designed cars might not be as solid as Toyota's, but their engineering was/is still good enough that, just like the Japanese cars, the main reason they stop working is because they rusted out.

https://thenewswheel.com/ford-killing-value-destroying-sedans-because-they-lose-money-every-year/

UBS analyst Colin Langan told Auto News that Ford loses approximately $800 million a year selling small cars in the United States, which stands in stark contrast to Ford’s estimated $3 billion first-quarter profit on truck and utility sales.

Taking this at face value, Ford lost money selling sedans the year before they simply stopped making them.

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