Out of Better Ideas

My wife called and left me bad news this morning in a voicemail--the local Ford dealer shut their doors for good suddenly yesterday. While I don't have one in the driveway right now, and more on why that is shortly, I have driven and owned ten Fords in the 39 years since I first got my driver's license. And for the last several years there has been a running joke in our house about the Mustang I am going to get one day. But Fords, along with pretty much every other American born and bred automobile, are on the endangered list. Plymouths, Oldsmobiles, and Pontiacs have already suffered extinction in recent years, and the number of once proud and iconic nameplates that will be relegated forever to history is very likely to grow until a generation or so from now children will ask, "Grandpa, what's a Ford (Or Chevy)?"

And, just like the sad end of the Passenger Pigeon, no one would have imagined such a thing was possible when America's driveways were lined with what Detroit turned out year after year. Time was when Ford could honestly claim that they were committed to "better ideas" in automotives, but those days appear gone forever. The truth is, one of the reasons I used to always have at least one, and often two, Fords in my garage, was that they were affordable and dependable transportation for me and my family. But, with a new Taurus now costing about 37K, the chances one will ever make it to my home are slim and none. If anybody at Ford headquarters wanted to even try to come up with a better idea for today, they would do well to look at what made Ford Motor Company such a success in the first place--affordable, simple, and reliable wheels for the average American.

I'm not saying it is time to bring back the Model T, but when a family sedan costs nearly 40 thousand, well it doesn't work for my family. And judging by the dismal sales of American car makers pretty much across the board, the products they are manufacturing don't work for many other families as well. Yeah, Cash for Clunkers moved some cars over the summer, but that was a gimmick, not a solution for what ails Detroit's automakers. And gimmicks, like zero interest financing and cash back haven't succeeded over the last ten years in turning around the terminal direction of Chrysler, Ford, and GM. A better idea is more than a gimmick, it has staying power and traction, if you will excuse the expression, that can turn things around for the long-term as opposed to simply impacting month-end sales or quarterly reports.

Nobody is likely to ever ask me what I would do, but since this is my blog I'll share with you what I'd do if I were running Ford. First, everyone with a seven-figure income would take a 50% pay cut immediately. Folks with six-figures coming in would say good-bye to 40%. And the people on assembly lines who are represented by their unions would have to face the choice of conceding to some reductions in pay or join the 10+ million other Americans who are now out of work. As Ford's CEO I would have to play hardball with all the companies who supply us. They'd have to drop their prices, or lose our business completely when we are forced to shut down and follow Oldsmobile, Plymouth, and Pontiac into extinction. With costs being cut we at Ford could then offer the American public something shocking, affordable cars and trucks! And I bet we'd start selling a lot more of them than we have in a long time.

And those cars and trucks we'd be selling, well they might not come in 30 different colors, but at least there would be a choice of something besides black (No offense, Henry). Affordability, along with emphasizing practicality, reliability, and safety, used to put a lot of Fords on the road. I don't know if it's possible that it could ever happen again. But why should Ford or GM even bother to try and come up with better ideas when the government is willing to bail out failure without any requisite improvement of performance?

Well, it was never likely that I would have ever seen that Mustang in my driveway anyway, so it won't hurt that much when, along with everyone else, I'll have to walk to a museum to see the sweet little "Pony Car."

Before anyone suggests that I have something against free-market economy, let me state that I'm not the one who has been destroying the free market. The truth is, the American free-market was shuttered a long time ago, replaced by the greed-market. And the most greedy got what they were after, obscene wealth for themselves, and unearned, unrealistic, and self-indulgent "prosperity" for many of the rest of us. And we stoked and rode the greed market as far as it could carry us all, until now it's coming crashing down on all of us. It's not like Jesus didn't warn us about greed; His Word tells us that the love of money results in a world of hurt (1Timothy 6.1), and so it has for our economy and nation.

Anyone have any better ideas?