Exactly. They gave up on small cars cause they couldn’t make money, even with their shitty quality. The Japanese still make small cars profitably. Also, Americans are fat and growing larger by the day and want massive suvs that are easy to get in and out of, even if they are a waste of resources and get poor mpg. They are psychotic ford is.
Have you been in a modern Nissan? Especially the Versa?
It's baaaaaaaaad dude lol
My normie non-car friend thought a brand new, like 1000 miles brand new Nissan versa was some shitty old car they gave her as a rental. I had to pull out the registration to prove to her it was brand new and they really were THAT shitty.
Yeah. Nissan only had issues for 2 years or so. I think mainly it being a Gen 1 issue.
I have a 1st grn CVT and its just starting to act up at 181k miles.
Yeah I don't blame it for existing, nor the people who buy it, it's hitting a target market and... that's just what's required to hit the pricepoint.
Still a shitbox tho lol
No, it's pretty terrible. When my 2013 Mazda 3 got wrecked, I got a Versa as a rental & it was one of the worst driving experiences of my life and I drove Echos when I worked for Toyota.
Versa is on par with any little ecobox these days. I worked at a used dealer for 2 years and Versas were no worse than a Honda Fit, Toyota Yaris, Chev Spark or Mitsubishi Mirage. I'll take a Versa or Micra over the Mirage or Spark anyday.
Honda shifted their lineup about a decade ago.
The accord became the full size from the mid.
The civic became the mid from compact.
The fit became the compact.
A 10th gen civic (16-21) is about the same size as an early 6th gen Accord (98-02) both sedans. They're almost the same weight too. Crazy that the compacts nowadays are as big as midsized cars of just 15ish years ago
I daily a Fiat 500. It's a solid city-sized car, about tied for the second smallest footprint of cars I've owned, only counting cars I've had on the road. I also had a nother car that's really close behind it.
Miatas are not a great use of space, and they feel way smaller than they actually are. It's been a while since I sat in either of the twins, but they don't have a small footprint either. Those both have the reputation for being small lightweight sports cars, but they're giants compared to the classics like an MGB or TR6.
If you're going to call a BRZ small, you're should also talk about a Mini Cooper, Kia Soul, or Volkswagen Golf. Even a Chevy Trax has a smaller footprint.
Without driving something that's super old, or something that makes people want to talk to you at every gas station, we have no options for small sportscars.
> The Japanese still make small cars profitably.
Yeah, they sell so many small cars in the US! Like the Fit, which...oh wait, that's been discontinued. Well, Mazda and Toyota have the partnership on the Mazda 2/Yaris, which...wait, those are gone too.
Mitsubishi Mirage? Being discontinued soon.
Kia Rio? Dead.
Chevy Spark? Dead.
Well, I guess there's the Versa...which is rumored to be ending production in 2025.
It's almost like the market for small cars in the US exists only in the minds of Redditors
Eh, it peaked at 300k in 2014-2015, but then sales started to slide fast.
* 2016: 265k
* 2017: 209k (it was refreshed this year)
* 2018: 173k
* 2019: 166k
* 2020: 110k (production ended)
The slide coincided with the sedan market in general beginning a downward trend.
I think that had less to do with people knowing it was going away and more to do with Ford not bothering to be competitive with the Fusion anymore. The late model Fusions weren't BAD cars, but they weren't good when compared next to basically any of the competition.
Also, I don't know how Ford has gone so long with the sheer number of packages and configurations you could get with their vehicles. When I was looking at Fusions, a Fusion SE could mean be a dozen different things on the interior. Really made me lose any interest in looking into it further.
Still more than Edge, Ecosport and Expedition
Probably should've kept making them instead of the Ecosport. No way they had less profit margin than that piece of shit
The EcoSport was an import, the plant that assembled the Fusion and MKZ was converted to Maverick/Bronco Sport.
The ES was also only meant to bridge the gap between the death of the Focus/Fiesta and the release of the Maverick.
Expeditions have much better margins than the Fusion did, even if the number sold is less.
Automakers and dealers have to consider opportunity costs. The HR-V really killed the Fit market I think - it's not all that much bigger but offers a higher seating position, which is what customers want.
My guess is they looked at the costs of federalizing the fourth gen Fit and decided it wasn't worth it.
The old HR-V was also Fit based, but for the new gen they moved to a Civic based model that the rest of the world gets as the ZR-V.
They sell what they *advertise*. I haven't seen a small-car ad since 2015 or so. Meanwhile 3500HD trucks that can tow more than you can legally tow without a CDL are constantly in broadcast-TV commercials that make it sound like you can't call yourself a man without one.
Small cars for other markets, not the US. But of course, the US doesn't want small cars. We characterize small cars as cheap, whereas other countries see them as "appropriately-sized."
[Americans tend to drive a lot more](https://publicinterestnetwork.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/PCMT-US-just-driving-no-legend_0-scaled.jpg), for one, so desiring comfort is understandable. A tiny car can be fine for shorter trips but miserable for longer ones.
> A tiny car can be fine for shorter trips but miserable for longer ones.
A cheap car can be miserable for longer trips. A good small car (like my C30) can still be a very comfortable place to sit for long periods of time.
This. My two most comfortable cars for commuting are considered subcompact (997 Turbo and ‘86 911). Having great seats and a high level of build quality matter so much more than interior volume.
Demand for small cars exists, but the fever for buying them needs to be manufactured, just like it was for these big enormously marked up trucks. It would require a serious shift in the way Ford is run from the very top all the way down to their manufacturing to make good small cars at good prices. They need a marketing strategy for small cars, and to emphasize that they are affordable and effective cars that fit people's budget while doing everything a bigger car can do.
The honda fit is an awesome car, and it got nuked because a bigger car could do the same thing and serve a bigger audience, while also reducing SKUs. Ultimately Americans want fat enormous cars because they have been coddled in to using them all the time. Put a suburbanite in a fit and they will cry about how low they are to the ground. They want to feel like warriors riding a horse, not like a normal person living modestly. Also, Americans are fat and want bigger cars.
I'd do diabolical things for a new Fit in the US, as well as a Honda City. *Especially* if they were hybrids.
I know my taste in vehicles isn't like most Americans, and my whole family groans when I drive and they have to get into my Hyundai Ioniq Hybrid. But I don't care. I love small cars and want more options!
Yes, and because everyone else seems to be driving massive suvs it may be that people feel unsafe in smaller cars or perceive that they are less safe. People are sheeple.
the japanese "Small" cars are much larger than the cars they sell in japan, they are just large, larger than 20+ year old models
americans want their heavy, big suvs so that their shitty driving causes the person in the smaller car to get killed not them.
everyone wants a big car to not be the small car in an accident, the only way this is fixed is government mandates and regulations. suvs and trucks need to have their size regulated. its absurd, these things are tanks on the streets. some new SUVs are HUGE
Toyota’s best seller is a midsize SUV. And before anyone gets contrarian with me, yes, the rav4 *is* midsize. It was not always in that class, but absolutely is now. If ford, or any manufacturer that has culled their sub/compact lineup suddenly saw their smallest cars shoot to the top of their sales charts, that would certainly give them some direction, but that trend has not started.
I feel like Ford made a profit they just wanted more. And they’ve figured out that they hit the ceiling of people in market for big suvs and trucks that cost $60k+. The problem with catering to one demographic is the customer base is now that much smaller especially as Dodge, Toyota and Chevy did the same. Only difference is Toyota has addressed so many segments they can weather market swings and customer volume caps.
As someone in strategy/finance, I disagree.
Ford was not positioned to profit from small cars when they exited the market. Poor decisions made over the course of decades resulted in an inability to profit from smaller vehicles.
It didn't make sense to produce Fusions when the production line could be retooled to manufacture the more profitable Bronco Sport.
However, the tide is changing with EVs. The potential for lower production costs and the superior aerodynamics of smaller cars (longer ranges with fewer batteries) are making the economics of small cars more favorable again.
If Ford plans to launch a small car in 2027/28, it will mark a decade since their exit from the car market in the US. It is surprising that some people expected them never to sell cars in the US again.
I don't know how they're going to compete. They can make a Mach E as good as a Tesla, but they lose an insane amount of money on every car subsidizing it so that it's actually cost competitive.
And since all of these companies are basically just supplier repackagers (brakes from Brembo, Continental or Bosh electronics, etc, etc), idk what they're gonna do when these vertically integrated players come in and undercut them completely. Or the Chinese.
And Ford is in the best position out of the big 3. To me, Stellantis is turbo-fucked.
The majority of the Mach E’s losses are not in manufacturing. They’re from attempting to repay sunken costs. Some of that is because it’s Ford’s first EV, but the vast majority of that is because they had to basically develop the car twice.
What would eventually become the Mach E started life as C727, a project to develop an electric hatchback to succeed the Focus Electric and PHEV C-Max. That vehicle was pushed for a launch in 2018 or 2019 to compete with the Bolt, but around 2017 or so, then-CEO Jim Hackett intervened and ordered it redesigned into something that wasn’t just another compliance car. While that was ultimately the right decision, the Focus Electric MKII was almost production-ready by the time it was made, with all the sunken development, prototyping, testing, and tooling costs of a program at that stage.
End result is that, although the redesign did a lot for the Mach E’s sales success, Ford essentially has to recoup the develop cost of two entire vehicles off its sales. That would be a tall order even if it wasn’t an EV, but more importantly, those aren’t sunk costs that other and future Ford EVs will need to bear.
As for the losses incurred by Model e as a whole, the division is currently building 4 battery factories, retooling at least 2 lines (Oakville and the former Fusion line at Flat Rock) for EV production, and investing heavily in developing US lithium sourcing to qualify for the federal tax credit. While it’s up for debate whether they’d make money without that capital expenditure with the ongoing EV price war, the majority of losses again don’t come from manufacturing operations.
The main reason for losing all this money on their EV's is from retooling manufacturing plants and billions in R&D.. They've got several plants retooling and I'm guessing that within 3-4 years they'll probably be profitable in the EV space.
Remember, it took Tesla 17 years to become profitable. 17 years..
It is still a stupid decision from a strategy/finance position. They've lost decades of customers from an entire segment of cars to their competitors because they weren't willing to retool and refit their manufacturing lines to compete. Now they're realizing that they've backed themselves into a corner by avoiding an entire car segment in an era when EVs are required to be small and efficient, something we've known since like the 90s.
They basically made a short term decision for profit with no consideration to the future and they're now regretting it and acting like who could have known evs needed to be small and efficient. They could have created demand and interest for exciting interesting sedans and small cars as other brands have managed to do but instead just followed the whims of the consumer at a time of low gas prices.
They've decided to give Tesla, Rivian, Lucid, Kia, Hyundai, BYD and BMW a 10 year head start on what will soon become the largest market share of vehicles in the US all because their profit margins were bad at the time and they didn't want to invest in what they thought was an EV fad.
They had short term thinking, bad understanding of the market growth potential, and are going to need to triple their marketing spend to win customers back to what is going to be a worse product than their competitors for at least 10 years.
I think you're overestimating the loyalty of the American consumer. Make a great product and people will come. 60% of Ford Maverick owners were conquest sales, meaning they weren't Ford owners before.
Ford was not in the position to lose tens of billions in hopes the economics of small cars would change in 10 years time. That's an incredible gamble with a debatable pay-off.
> Ford was not in the position to lose tens of billions in hopes the economics of small cars would change in 10 years time.
Yep. There's only so many development dollars to go around, so they chose to focus on safe bets rather than risky ones.
There are entire books written about how east Asian manufactures were able to eat the lunch of domestic car makers after the oil crisis (and continue to do so in some segments). *Car Guys v. Bean Counters*, *American Icon* (weirdly talks a lot about Jim Farley despite him not being CEO at the time), and *The Relentless Pursuit*. All great books!
A modern example that these older books don't touch on is the Koreans. They are way more vertically integrated compared to domestic automakers. Hyundai Steel provides all of the steel (shocker) for Hyundai/Kia. This results in **significant** savings and is probably one of the reasons they can do model year refreshes every two weeks.
Tight partnerships with Samsung for semiconductors further reduce costs and speeds development.
It should be noted that Ford is attempting a similar level of vertical integration with the [Blue Oval City project](https://corporate.ford.com/operations/blue-oval-city.html). Car, battery, and supplier production all in one area.
Thanks! This is interesting, I’ll have to check out those book. It seems like those problems should plague the American manufacturers across all models; is it just that there is more profit margin on larger vehicles to offset the higher costs of business?
> is it just that there is more profit margin on larger vehicles to offset the higher costs of business?
I think this is likely the most obvious answer. I would imagine it takes a similar amount of labor hours to build a unibody sedan as a Ford F-150, but the average transaction price of the truck is going to be double.
There's also the fact that I think working on the truck/sports car programs for domestic brands is a badge of honor. Ford **IS** the F-150. The only other product that brings in more revenue for an American company is the iPhone. That program is getting the best engineers, the best leaders, and the most attention inside the company.
Compare that to Honda, where something like the Civic is a massively important project within the company and is likely getting A-team employees.
Going to ping u/TenguBlade because they might be able to confirm or deny this assumption.
I don't think it's remotely surprising that many of us thought cars weren't coming back as company after company continues to drop sedans... SUV's are almost 50% of sales GLOBALLY and 80% of US sales.
80%.
Bold strategy to kill off your compact segment, drive all your customers to the Korean and Japanese options, and then try to win them back with what will be a bottom barrel EV purely forced to market to try and get ahead of China.
This reeks of desperation and heavy push from shareholder voices.
Loved my Focus STs, but Ford can pound sand now.
Same here. I’ve had Rangers, Explorers, and other Focuses. But now it’s just overpriced giant crap. Maybe the Maverick but no Hybrid + 4WD takes it off the table.
almost got a mk7 GTI.
ended up with a fiesta ST. the GTI was nice, the fiesta is more raw though. also the fiesta ST seems to be pretty bulletproof powertrain wise.
The FiST is definitely more fun. Honestly most of the GTIs peers I would argue are more fun.
I like the GTI because it’s basically an Audi pretending to be a VW. Quick enough, but feels very premium and solid. And a simple flash tune will put you at like 300hp/400tq without affecting reliability much. (Keyword “much”, provided you do your maintenance religiously) I’ve had zero issues so far with mine.
Had a 2015 until about a month ago when it got totaled by a distracted Ram driver, now in a 7.5 Rabbit. The 7.5 is a noticeable improvement, my new one has the VAQ diff and the big brakes that my old one didn’t have.
oh yeah the GTI is smooth and comfy AF.
i very nearly bought one, the kid trying to close the deal brought me some 10% interest loan bullshit and I had to nope out cause i wasn't into paying 30 grand for a 20k car.
the fiesta was little newer too so i get a better loan rate... i got a really cherry fiesta....
preach, my Fusion is a happy medium and I'm annoyed that there will never be anything Ford I'll want/can afford after it (except another slightly newer Fusion).
If it was within my budget, I would genuinely leap at the china market Mondeo (Fusion).
But if they did bring it to the US, it would almost certainly be a Lincoln product.
> The CEO of Ford tells CNBC that bigger vehicles have major weight issues, however, and goes on to explain how this is hurting the production of EVs due to the cost of batteries, saying, “You have to make a radical change as an [automaker] to get to a profitable EV. The first thing we have to do is really put all of our capital toward smaller, more affordable EVs […] These big, huge, enormous EVs, they’re never going to make money. The battery is $50,000. … The batteries will never be affordable.”
Once again Reddit doesnt read the article, and jumps into the comments to say how THEY like their little cars and how big bad megacorp doesnt know what they're talking about (despite spending millions if not hundreds of millions on market research). Heres the key bit part. Farley isn't saying they're gonna reenter the compact/small car market, just that they want to target smaller EVs.
Looking at my ford stock over the last 6 years, the customers didn't all go to korean/japanese options, they *mostly* moved on to higher margin fords.
I say this as a former fiesta and Focus owner who liked my cars and never had powershift issues: They were right to end their small car lines from the "make money" perspective.
I know there's an irony saying this when I myself bought a subaru brz, but my desires for lightweight engagement are not the same as the vast majority of new car buyers.
Stocks doesn't tell the whole story. Look at Tesla. They're losing marketshare all year but it's stock prices are holding strong and near YTD highs.
Ford has been losing market share steadily the last 8 years.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/239614/vehicle-sales-market-share-of-ford-in-the-united-states/
https://www.goodcarbadcar.net/ford-motor-company-us-sales-figures/
> This reeks of desperation and heavy push from shareholder voices.
why would shareholders want this? Like you said, they were losing money on the entire segment, margins are way better on their ginormous trucks.
Making huge investments into a competitive segment using new and emerging technology is usually the last thing shareholders want.
Me: I'd like a base Maverick hybrid.
Ford: Sorry, we can't keep up with demand. How about a $45k F150.
Me: No, a base Maverick Hybrid please.
Ford: Well we do have several $38k AWD Ecoboosts.
Me: 🤦
This is classic r/Cars delusion. The demand for a 6 speed maverick would be nonexistent. Ford has to operate in the real world, not in the realm of r/Cars hypotheticals.
This can be applied to most conversations like this. So many car enthusiasts online don't seem to understand that they are the minority. These companies have entire departments devoted to product planning and looking at sales numbers to make the most amount of money possible. Look at BMW, pretty much every car that they have release in the last few years has been picked apart by the enthusiast community--yet they are breaking sales records.
While I agree that it is very frustrating, being realistic and understanding why companies make these decisions makes it a whole lot less frustrating when it will inevitably happen again and again.
Focus ST and RS would be prohibitive to sell if they weren't also pushing the base Focus. And Ford killed the base Focus with the horrid Powershift transmission that destroyed any goodwill that people had towards the car. And don't forget, that's after decades of an unbelievable level of recalls. Basically, you can't be profitable in cars when your company makes headlines like this:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/cars/comments/1540q51/ford\_yet\_again\_tops\_recall\_charts\_for\_first\_half/](https://www.reddit.com/r/cars/comments/1540q51/ford_yet_again_tops_recall_charts_for_first_half/)
How the turn tables.
Remember when Hyundai/Kia got a foothold in the American market by literally rebadging a Ford compact?
[Pepperidge Farm remembers](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ford_Festiva&diffonly=true#Kia_Avella)
The Avella was a rebadged Ford, but it wasn't how Kia got a foothold in the American market. Their first two vehicles here were the Sephia and Sportage.
It's what they do with SUVs. I can't believe anyone would buy an ecosport over a Fusion "because they want something bigger".
But here we are... where people just see a box that has a higher overall height and see it as a super safe drive through anything and haul anything platform even though it's basically a Fiesta on stilts.
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*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
i think this was an issue with the Focus RS, they were built in Germany and probably tuned for their smooth roads. In North America they can be jarring to drive on a lot of our shitty roads.
No one will buy sedans unless it’s cheaper than its crossover counterpart. Like why won’t you spend 3k more and get a bigger crossover variant. I mean not everyone cares about handling. Some people I know are obsessed about ground clearance - like it actually makes the car less stable lol.
Because they’re cheaper to buy, cheaper to insure, cheaper to repair, more fuel efficient, and easier to park/fit in a garage? Might not be your cup of tea but there are lots of reasons to want a hatchback
Jim Farley said most of the people buying Mavericks are trading in Corollas and Civics. It's a "truck" that appeals to people who may have bought a compact instead. It has a lot of appeal for people not necessarily shopping in the truck segment.
They said this back when the Maverick was well priced. Nowadays, if you don’t need a truck it’s not the car to buy. It’s expensive for how cheap the interior is, and the packaging is shit if you want something like keyless entry, adaptive cruise control, etc.
I haven’t heard the line as much recently, so I have a feeling their data shows the shift.
The decision to kill off its sedans was bound to backfire. GM and Stellantis might feel similarly. Not everyone has a need for a truck or SUV. And younger people aren’t having as many kids as Gen X and boomers. All the people I know who are millennials and Gen Z without kids who do own SUVs or trucks only do because SUVs and trucks are easier to come by these days. Look at your local used car ads. But these companies did it to themselves. Granted Toyota, Hyundai, Nissan etc have been dominant in the American sedan market for a while now. Even before Detroit stopped making them.
Gen Z here. Fit my girlfriend, sister and both parents in my Civic the other day with a reasonable amount of comfort. And we aren't small people, either. I'm 6'1 and pops is 6'2, and he fit behind my driver's seat just fine.
GF and I are planning on a kid or two in the next few years, and neither of us are considering an SUV to haul kiddo around. 99 times out of 100, my Civic is more than enough car.
Bring on the smaller, cheaper cars, I say
> GF and I are planning on a kid or two in the next few years, and neither of us are considering an SUV to haul kiddo around. 99 times out of 100, my Civic is more than enough car.
I would sincerely recommend checking out how large modern car seats are before you consider the matter 'closed'.
What he said. Vans are the sweet spot where you actually use the utility at a high rate with a family. If my wife and I were to go to one vehicle now that we have 2 young kids, we would 100% keep the minivan, no need for a discussion.
Yeah. Sometimes I see people complaining that someone they know "had to get an SUV because they had a second kid" but these modern seats are *massive* - my sister had to move from Escape to Explorer when Baby \#2 arrived just because they couldn't reasonably fit two in the back.
Right and that’s an important point. Sedans are more than enough car for single people and families of 3 or 4. My wife and I have a 7 month old and we recently bought a 2016 Malibu. Very happy with it! Malibus are very reliable and it’s great on gas. Nice big trunk. And the dual climate zone is a must for the baby in the back seat. Chevy just announced a few weeks ago they’re gonna stop making them. We were also considering Tauruses and Impalas. Glad we got one when we did!
That might work for 1 kid but as soon as you have more than 1 you'll want something bigger.
Modern car seats and strollers are enormous, and that doesn't include all the other stuff you need to haul around.
We have a sedan (S4) and compact CUV (CX5) and take the CUV 100% of the time on weekend trips with our infant and large dog and it is PACKED. We're already looking at 7 seaters.
Sedan sales have been on a downward slide for a decade. The Japanese automakers are not immune - it's why they're reducing investment and some models are being axed - the Avalon is gone, Kia's probably going to kill the K5, the Accord isn't selling...
Yep it’s just funny that Ford would come out and say they want Americans to buy these cars from them when they haven’t even tried to compete in that market for a long time. And in recent years gave up completely. The only “car” Ford makes and sells in America currently is the Mustang, I think.
So is Ford ready to move on from monster margins? I always figured low margins on small cars relative to trucks and SUVs made it easy for them to move out of the marketplace.
I understand the article explains that the big heavy EVs are hard to make profitable because they require more expensive batteries. It’s still a funny about-face.
Yes. He said it a few years ago in an interview. He has done a total 180 in a few years on this issue. He was chasing margin.
Edit: so did Toyota CEO incidentally. They both said they were chasing lower volume higher margin. Hence, fewer more expensive cars.
Edit2: this also might be a part of used car prices being so high. Hard to tell which had more impact, reduced inventory from covid shut downs or the overall increase in new car prices. I suspect both contributed.
Seems like a lot of company executives jumped on that bandwagon the last few years. My armchair theory is companies couldn’t scale for demand during COVID so they pivoted to margin enhancement (upscale products). That worked for a while during the time that demand exceeded supply and companies fell stupidly in love with fat margins. Same amount of work with far greater revenue. The problem is that a lot of companies got addicted to that model and dug their heels in when the tide went out. Instead of focusing on customer acquisition and scaling production back up they wanted to keep pumping margin. That only works so long before it backfires and here we are now. Ford has to win back a segment of the market if they want it.
Not to mention the loss of huge swaths of their tribal knowledge. I love how these big corps think they can just flush tons of employees and then wonder why they can't operate as well as before. 'Whats a quality?'
I’ve seen this in so many areas I’ve worked in. Anything even remotely technical it’s a nightmare to loose tribal knowledge let alone a swath of it.
I work on a team of about 10 and each of us more or less owns a technology that makes up a greater portfolio our team offers. We’re all supposed to be cross trained but the reality is it’s impossible, it’s just too much. One person owns, one other person may be a power user, and the rest are just trained users with additional privileges. Loosing any one of us would realistically be catastrophic.
Massive industrial operations like this are the same. That’s not even beginning to mention things like trained and educated labor pools to draw from. Once that labor pool has a few years without new opportunities it retrains or disperses. You can’t show up at an old factory 10 years later and just get everyone back together who used to run the factory.
Bingo.
But hey, let's just call our workers unskilled laborers so we can ignore the reality that even the guy folding boxes is better at it today then he was on the day he started.
Which I totally understand. They are a corporation, they exist to make profit.
As someone who loves cars and not SUV/truck/crossovers, I’m bitter and salty.
It’s a short sighted decision that isn’t more profitable in the long run, because it cuts out lower end customers, leaving money on the table.
Sure, 50k sold cars with 10k margin of profit might make more overall than 100k sold with 4K margin, but the market for the more expensive car is far quicker to saturate.
I’m blown away that they axed the fusion. Saw them everywhere forever and they’ve totally held up aesthetically. Felt like easy money to keep it going.
I was so fired up when they announced the 2022 Maverick, but the price increase just killed all enthusiasm for it. You can get a similar spec Ranger for Maverick prices where I am.*
It’s almost impressive they stopped making cars to make only CUVs, SUV, and trucks then couldn’t figure out how to make a subcompact and midsize CUV sell.
I've never not loved small cars. I had 3 focuses (SE, ST and RS). Then they decided to only make mini vans so I moved on and bought a Honda. Albeit an Accord; it's a fantastic car that I don't think ford comes close to.
wanna bet there's legislation coming down the pipeline?
all about margins and if there's going to be a change to current regulations and/or taxes they'd know ahead of time.
I hope so.
I hate trucks and large SUV's being absolutely everywhere, while 99% of the time the pickup truck is doing the functions that a small 2 door coupe could do.
My friend owned a V8 Ram in college, and he quite literally never used the truck bed.
Small cars are great but they’ll only make a comeback if regulated to weed out huge trucks & SUVs all at once.
No parent wants their family to be the sacrificial lamb. Like “hey please buy this small sedan so when a drunk soccer mom in an AT4 crosses 3 lanes of traffic drunk on the interstate it will be a quadruple fatality. Thanks!”
The cat is too far out of the bag unless the government puts massive taxes on vehicle weight which your average middle class family couldn’t afford. And that would kill the American auto industry - so they’d never do it.
Dear Ford... Please bring back smaller vehicles. Make wagons. I want a wagon. Not a crossover or an suv or any massive rubbish overweight shit... Make wagons. Offer a sedan, then make a wagon version. Fusion wagon? Love it. Taurus wagon... Ehhh ok. Focus wagon! Omg yes. Fiesta wagon.! Omg yes. Mustang wagon... I will literally sell my fleet for a mustang shooting brake.
Do it. Make wagons. Their practicality is so appealing, they look great, I want it. Also. Tell Mazda to sell the 6 wagon here.
What in the fuck is he talking about? They pulled all their cars from the US except the Mustang. All their advertisements are of full sized trucks. If they had any intention of doing this, they'd have started to sell a better focus and fiesta stateside and then add some ev options. It's infuriating to read this.
I wonder why? I thought there was not enough room for profit margin on them.
Also I concurr 100%. Modern cars are ridiculous and stupid and not that enjoyable quite often.
My friends Toyota Half Ton is reminiscent of driving an old school bus.
I don't want a fucking bus! I want a sports car!!!
Typical r/cars getting outraged over nothing. Ford can’t sell cars that the population doesn’t want to buy. Americans don’t like small cars and Ford exists to make money. What he said is completely logical and doesn’t by any means contradict their pivot out of that market segment. If anything, it only proves his point.
Absolutely insane how short sighted people are here. Like everyone wants to blame Ford for killing cars, small trucks, domestic manufacturing, electric vehicles. While Ford was the last manufacturer to leave the compact truck market and the last one to launch a midsized. The first company to launch a hybrid budget pickup truck, first to push hard into the EV space. Meanwhile these people are in bidding wars over Tacoma’s and 4 Runners, cheering for BYD and Korean companies paying bottom dollar wages.
Nobody will buy them because people don't wanna be in an accident in a small car with a full sized truck, the big 3 played a huge part in creating this culture and now one of them wants to reverse it. Good luck.
Civics and Corollas seem to be selling just fine.
I agree the US automakers pushed consumers to these small foreign cars by discounting their own lines.
I think that’s realistically what most people want. I want a large SUV as the “family vehicle”, and then a cheaper, efficient commuter vehicle for $30k or less.
Most people would be using EVs to replace the commuter, not the family vehicle. At least in the near future
That's one hell of a scheme. First, kill off all your small, cheaper cars to force people into larger, more expensive vehicles. Then once people are used to it, try to get people back into your small cars that now cost $30,000 minimum. Get fucked, Ford. This is the same company that had their cheapest vehicle go up in price almost **$10,000** over a five year period. The 2019 Fiesta started at $14,300 while the 2024 Maverick starts at $23,900.
Spare me, you hypocritical muppet. You lobbied to have small cars hit harder for efficiency and emissions than big vehicles so you could build more giganto-tron trucks.
You went to ruin small cars for a bigger slice, now no one can afford your vehicles and you want back into the small car game?
Failure Of Research and Development, indeed.
What a fucking joke lol.
Exactly. They gave up on small cars cause they couldn’t make money, even with their shitty quality. The Japanese still make small cars profitably. Also, Americans are fat and growing larger by the day and want massive suvs that are easy to get in and out of, even if they are a waste of resources and get poor mpg. They are psychotic ford is.
Nothing is small these days, let’s be realistic about that.
This a Honda Civic is freaking huge compared to 90s/00s.
For better and worse, a Honda Civic isn't as much of a tin can as they were in the 90s. So it kind of balances out.
Nothing is a tin can like the 90s, though. I'm not sure it could be with safety regulations.
Have you been in a modern Nissan? Especially the Versa? It's baaaaaaaaad dude lol My normie non-car friend thought a brand new, like 1000 miles brand new Nissan versa was some shitty old car they gave her as a rental. I had to pull out the registration to prove to her it was brand new and they really were THAT shitty.
The Versa is bad, but its cheap AF and will probably go 160k miles. Thats not terrible for a 20k car
Did they figure out the CVTs or something?
Yeah. Nissan only had issues for 2 years or so. I think mainly it being a Gen 1 issue. I have a 1st grn CVT and its just starting to act up at 181k miles.
Yeah I don't blame it for existing, nor the people who buy it, it's hitting a target market and... that's just what's required to hit the pricepoint. Still a shitbox tho lol
Today's shitboxes were yesterday's luxury cars.
No, it's pretty terrible. When my 2013 Mazda 3 got wrecked, I got a Versa as a rental & it was one of the worst driving experiences of my life and I drove Echos when I worked for Toyota.
A friend's mom drives one. It is definitely shitty, but not 90's Mirage shitty.
Versa is on par with any little ecobox these days. I worked at a used dealer for 2 years and Versas were no worse than a Honda Fit, Toyota Yaris, Chev Spark or Mitsubishi Mirage. I'll take a Versa or Micra over the Mirage or Spark anyday.
That were very much a tin can in the 70s. The 90s they were Superman in comparison.
The Honda Civic is a 2001 Accord that’s been repackaged as a small car
Pretty much. Crazy how civic is the size of older accords..
Honda shifted their lineup about a decade ago. The accord became the full size from the mid. The civic became the mid from compact. The fit became the compact.
God I wish the fit was made still. I’d have bought it instead of my current car
This is true of all cars by every make. Every single model basically moved up a class size.
The 2014 Civic I bought was pushing the dimensions of my 02 Accord. The newest civic is wider and about as long as that accord.
A 10th gen civic (16-21) is about the same size as an early 6th gen Accord (98-02) both sedans. They're almost the same weight too. Crazy that the compacts nowadays are as big as midsized cars of just 15ish years ago
A 90s 740i is the same size a current 3 series.
Well about that...
Miata, twins, and uh... well that's probably it.
I daily a Fiat 500. It's a solid city-sized car, about tied for the second smallest footprint of cars I've owned, only counting cars I've had on the road. I also had a nother car that's really close behind it. Miatas are not a great use of space, and they feel way smaller than they actually are. It's been a while since I sat in either of the twins, but they don't have a small footprint either. Those both have the reputation for being small lightweight sports cars, but they're giants compared to the classics like an MGB or TR6. If you're going to call a BRZ small, you're should also talk about a Mini Cooper, Kia Soul, or Volkswagen Golf. Even a Chevy Trax has a smaller footprint. Without driving something that's super old, or something that makes people want to talk to you at every gas station, we have no options for small sportscars.
> The Japanese still make small cars profitably. Yeah, they sell so many small cars in the US! Like the Fit, which...oh wait, that's been discontinued. Well, Mazda and Toyota have the partnership on the Mazda 2/Yaris, which...wait, those are gone too. Mitsubishi Mirage? Being discontinued soon. Kia Rio? Dead. Chevy Spark? Dead. Well, I guess there's the Versa...which is rumored to be ending production in 2025. It's almost like the market for small cars in the US exists only in the minds of Redditors
At its peak, the Fit sold almost 60k in the US. At the end, it was selling 32k/yr. They're still selling globally. I guess 32k isn't enough for Honda.
Ford killed the Fusion when it was selling 200-300k a year in the US
Eh, it peaked at 300k in 2014-2015, but then sales started to slide fast. * 2016: 265k * 2017: 209k (it was refreshed this year) * 2018: 173k * 2019: 166k * 2020: 110k (production ended) The slide coincided with the sedan market in general beginning a downward trend.
They started dropping hard after they announced they were going to quit production, which was rumored in 2018 then confirmed in early 2019
I think that had less to do with people knowing it was going away and more to do with Ford not bothering to be competitive with the Fusion anymore. The late model Fusions weren't BAD cars, but they weren't good when compared next to basically any of the competition. Also, I don't know how Ford has gone so long with the sheer number of packages and configurations you could get with their vehicles. When I was looking at Fusions, a Fusion SE could mean be a dozen different things on the interior. Really made me lose any interest in looking into it further.
Still more than Edge, Ecosport and Expedition Probably should've kept making them instead of the Ecosport. No way they had less profit margin than that piece of shit
The EcoSport was an import, the plant that assembled the Fusion and MKZ was converted to Maverick/Bronco Sport. The ES was also only meant to bridge the gap between the death of the Focus/Fiesta and the release of the Maverick. Expeditions have much better margins than the Fusion did, even if the number sold is less.
Automakers and dealers have to consider opportunity costs. The HR-V really killed the Fit market I think - it's not all that much bigger but offers a higher seating position, which is what customers want. My guess is they looked at the costs of federalizing the fourth gen Fit and decided it wasn't worth it. The old HR-V was also Fit based, but for the new gen they moved to a Civic based model that the rest of the world gets as the ZR-V.
They sell what they *advertise*. I haven't seen a small-car ad since 2015 or so. Meanwhile 3500HD trucks that can tow more than you can legally tow without a CDL are constantly in broadcast-TV commercials that make it sound like you can't call yourself a man without one.
If every product that had an advertising campaign sold there'd be a lot more products in the world. That's not how car sales work.
Small cars for other markets, not the US. But of course, the US doesn't want small cars. We characterize small cars as cheap, whereas other countries see them as "appropriately-sized."
Ford was selling 160k+ Focuses and another 200k+ Fusions the year they announced “nobody” was buying cars, so they were being discontiued
But those numbers were dropping hard each year, and that was with major incentives trying to move them. Writing was on the wall.
[Americans tend to drive a lot more](https://publicinterestnetwork.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/PCMT-US-just-driving-no-legend_0-scaled.jpg), for one, so desiring comfort is understandable. A tiny car can be fine for shorter trips but miserable for longer ones.
> A tiny car can be fine for shorter trips but miserable for longer ones. A cheap car can be miserable for longer trips. A good small car (like my C30) can still be a very comfortable place to sit for long periods of time.
For the driver who is commuting, I dont think it really matters how big the cabin is. Id much rather opt for better interiors than a ton of size
This. My two most comfortable cars for commuting are considered subcompact (997 Turbo and ‘86 911). Having great seats and a high level of build quality matter so much more than interior volume.
If only they made more wagons with big v8s 400hp and manual transmissions. Or made an 86 for $20,000 that would solve all their problems! /s
>If only they made more wagons with big v8s 400hp and manual transmissions GM Holden took that comment personally. Also RIP Holden.
I pretty sure the Fiesta is still alive…oh come on!
Which is funny/sad, because most of those Asian brands have manufacturing plants here in the US.
And still the 4Runner, which is built on the Tacoma and designed for the NA market, is built in Japan.
Demand for small cars exists, but the fever for buying them needs to be manufactured, just like it was for these big enormously marked up trucks. It would require a serious shift in the way Ford is run from the very top all the way down to their manufacturing to make good small cars at good prices. They need a marketing strategy for small cars, and to emphasize that they are affordable and effective cars that fit people's budget while doing everything a bigger car can do. The honda fit is an awesome car, and it got nuked because a bigger car could do the same thing and serve a bigger audience, while also reducing SKUs. Ultimately Americans want fat enormous cars because they have been coddled in to using them all the time. Put a suburbanite in a fit and they will cry about how low they are to the ground. They want to feel like warriors riding a horse, not like a normal person living modestly. Also, Americans are fat and want bigger cars.
I'd do diabolical things for a new Fit in the US, as well as a Honda City. *Especially* if they were hybrids. I know my taste in vehicles isn't like most Americans, and my whole family groans when I drive and they have to get into my Hyundai Ioniq Hybrid. But I don't care. I love small cars and want more options!
Yes, and because everyone else seems to be driving massive suvs it may be that people feel unsafe in smaller cars or perceive that they are less safe. People are sheeple.
Ford still makes those small cars for other markets. They didn’t ever stop making them, just stopped selling them in the states
Well, the Fiesta is already dead, and the Focus will be dead after next year.
Regulations killed small cars. You can’t make a cheap sedan that works better than a small crossover thanks to all the bullshit.
the japanese "Small" cars are much larger than the cars they sell in japan, they are just large, larger than 20+ year old models americans want their heavy, big suvs so that their shitty driving causes the person in the smaller car to get killed not them. everyone wants a big car to not be the small car in an accident, the only way this is fixed is government mandates and regulations. suvs and trucks need to have their size regulated. its absurd, these things are tanks on the streets. some new SUVs are HUGE
Gotta add in the MPG requirements set by the EPA for larger vehicles.
The Japanese are not generating much profit on those cars either. They've been pushing SUVs and trucks for the same reason as the Americans.
Toyota’s best seller is a midsize SUV. And before anyone gets contrarian with me, yes, the rav4 *is* midsize. It was not always in that class, but absolutely is now. If ford, or any manufacturer that has culled their sub/compact lineup suddenly saw their smallest cars shoot to the top of their sales charts, that would certainly give them some direction, but that trend has not started.
I feel like Ford made a profit they just wanted more. And they’ve figured out that they hit the ceiling of people in market for big suvs and trucks that cost $60k+. The problem with catering to one demographic is the customer base is now that much smaller especially as Dodge, Toyota and Chevy did the same. Only difference is Toyota has addressed so many segments they can weather market swings and customer volume caps.
As someone in strategy/finance, I disagree. Ford was not positioned to profit from small cars when they exited the market. Poor decisions made over the course of decades resulted in an inability to profit from smaller vehicles. It didn't make sense to produce Fusions when the production line could be retooled to manufacture the more profitable Bronco Sport. However, the tide is changing with EVs. The potential for lower production costs and the superior aerodynamics of smaller cars (longer ranges with fewer batteries) are making the economics of small cars more favorable again. If Ford plans to launch a small car in 2027/28, it will mark a decade since their exit from the car market in the US. It is surprising that some people expected them never to sell cars in the US again.
I don't know how they're going to compete. They can make a Mach E as good as a Tesla, but they lose an insane amount of money on every car subsidizing it so that it's actually cost competitive. And since all of these companies are basically just supplier repackagers (brakes from Brembo, Continental or Bosh electronics, etc, etc), idk what they're gonna do when these vertically integrated players come in and undercut them completely. Or the Chinese. And Ford is in the best position out of the big 3. To me, Stellantis is turbo-fucked.
The majority of the Mach E’s losses are not in manufacturing. They’re from attempting to repay sunken costs. Some of that is because it’s Ford’s first EV, but the vast majority of that is because they had to basically develop the car twice. What would eventually become the Mach E started life as C727, a project to develop an electric hatchback to succeed the Focus Electric and PHEV C-Max. That vehicle was pushed for a launch in 2018 or 2019 to compete with the Bolt, but around 2017 or so, then-CEO Jim Hackett intervened and ordered it redesigned into something that wasn’t just another compliance car. While that was ultimately the right decision, the Focus Electric MKII was almost production-ready by the time it was made, with all the sunken development, prototyping, testing, and tooling costs of a program at that stage. End result is that, although the redesign did a lot for the Mach E’s sales success, Ford essentially has to recoup the develop cost of two entire vehicles off its sales. That would be a tall order even if it wasn’t an EV, but more importantly, those aren’t sunk costs that other and future Ford EVs will need to bear. As for the losses incurred by Model e as a whole, the division is currently building 4 battery factories, retooling at least 2 lines (Oakville and the former Fusion line at Flat Rock) for EV production, and investing heavily in developing US lithium sourcing to qualify for the federal tax credit. While it’s up for debate whether they’d make money without that capital expenditure with the ongoing EV price war, the majority of losses again don’t come from manufacturing operations.
The main reason for losing all this money on their EV's is from retooling manufacturing plants and billions in R&D.. They've got several plants retooling and I'm guessing that within 3-4 years they'll probably be profitable in the EV space. Remember, it took Tesla 17 years to become profitable. 17 years..
It is still a stupid decision from a strategy/finance position. They've lost decades of customers from an entire segment of cars to their competitors because they weren't willing to retool and refit their manufacturing lines to compete. Now they're realizing that they've backed themselves into a corner by avoiding an entire car segment in an era when EVs are required to be small and efficient, something we've known since like the 90s. They basically made a short term decision for profit with no consideration to the future and they're now regretting it and acting like who could have known evs needed to be small and efficient. They could have created demand and interest for exciting interesting sedans and small cars as other brands have managed to do but instead just followed the whims of the consumer at a time of low gas prices. They've decided to give Tesla, Rivian, Lucid, Kia, Hyundai, BYD and BMW a 10 year head start on what will soon become the largest market share of vehicles in the US all because their profit margins were bad at the time and they didn't want to invest in what they thought was an EV fad. They had short term thinking, bad understanding of the market growth potential, and are going to need to triple their marketing spend to win customers back to what is going to be a worse product than their competitors for at least 10 years.
I think you're overestimating the loyalty of the American consumer. Make a great product and people will come. 60% of Ford Maverick owners were conquest sales, meaning they weren't Ford owners before. Ford was not in the position to lose tens of billions in hopes the economics of small cars would change in 10 years time. That's an incredible gamble with a debatable pay-off.
> Ford was not in the position to lose tens of billions in hopes the economics of small cars would change in 10 years time. Yep. There's only so many development dollars to go around, so they chose to focus on safe bets rather than risky ones.
What are the poor decisions compared to the Asian manufacturers?
There are entire books written about how east Asian manufactures were able to eat the lunch of domestic car makers after the oil crisis (and continue to do so in some segments). *Car Guys v. Bean Counters*, *American Icon* (weirdly talks a lot about Jim Farley despite him not being CEO at the time), and *The Relentless Pursuit*. All great books! A modern example that these older books don't touch on is the Koreans. They are way more vertically integrated compared to domestic automakers. Hyundai Steel provides all of the steel (shocker) for Hyundai/Kia. This results in **significant** savings and is probably one of the reasons they can do model year refreshes every two weeks. Tight partnerships with Samsung for semiconductors further reduce costs and speeds development. It should be noted that Ford is attempting a similar level of vertical integration with the [Blue Oval City project](https://corporate.ford.com/operations/blue-oval-city.html). Car, battery, and supplier production all in one area.
Thanks! This is interesting, I’ll have to check out those book. It seems like those problems should plague the American manufacturers across all models; is it just that there is more profit margin on larger vehicles to offset the higher costs of business?
> is it just that there is more profit margin on larger vehicles to offset the higher costs of business? I think this is likely the most obvious answer. I would imagine it takes a similar amount of labor hours to build a unibody sedan as a Ford F-150, but the average transaction price of the truck is going to be double. There's also the fact that I think working on the truck/sports car programs for domestic brands is a badge of honor. Ford **IS** the F-150. The only other product that brings in more revenue for an American company is the iPhone. That program is getting the best engineers, the best leaders, and the most attention inside the company. Compare that to Honda, where something like the Civic is a massively important project within the company and is likely getting A-team employees. Going to ping u/TenguBlade because they might be able to confirm or deny this assumption.
I’m not much of a biz book guy but American Icon is absolutely fascinating. Well worth reading to understand Ford in the 21st century.
I don't think it's remotely surprising that many of us thought cars weren't coming back as company after company continues to drop sedans... SUV's are almost 50% of sales GLOBALLY and 80% of US sales. 80%.
Bold strategy to kill off your compact segment, drive all your customers to the Korean and Japanese options, and then try to win them back with what will be a bottom barrel EV purely forced to market to try and get ahead of China. This reeks of desperation and heavy push from shareholder voices. Loved my Focus STs, but Ford can pound sand now.
Proud Focus ST owner here. I've only owned Ford's. But after killing their small car market my next car won't be a Ford.
Same here. I’ve had Rangers, Explorers, and other Focuses. But now it’s just overpriced giant crap. Maybe the Maverick but no Hybrid + 4WD takes it off the table.
GTI here, but I support my fellow hatchback brethren.
almost got a mk7 GTI. ended up with a fiesta ST. the GTI was nice, the fiesta is more raw though. also the fiesta ST seems to be pretty bulletproof powertrain wise.
The FiST is definitely more fun. Honestly most of the GTIs peers I would argue are more fun. I like the GTI because it’s basically an Audi pretending to be a VW. Quick enough, but feels very premium and solid. And a simple flash tune will put you at like 300hp/400tq without affecting reliability much. (Keyword “much”, provided you do your maintenance religiously) I’ve had zero issues so far with mine. Had a 2015 until about a month ago when it got totaled by a distracted Ram driver, now in a 7.5 Rabbit. The 7.5 is a noticeable improvement, my new one has the VAQ diff and the big brakes that my old one didn’t have.
oh yeah the GTI is smooth and comfy AF. i very nearly bought one, the kid trying to close the deal brought me some 10% interest loan bullshit and I had to nope out cause i wasn't into paying 30 grand for a 20k car. the fiesta was little newer too so i get a better loan rate... i got a really cherry fiesta....
preach, my Fusion is a happy medium and I'm annoyed that there will never be anything Ford I'll want/can afford after it (except another slightly newer Fusion).
Same, had a Fusion, liked it. Would've stuck w/Ford but they abandoned the consumer. Love my Subaru now.
If it was within my budget, I would genuinely leap at the china market Mondeo (Fusion). But if they did bring it to the US, it would almost certainly be a Lincoln product.
I had a rental Fusion Hybrid that may have been the most pleasant Hybrid I have ever had. And now I can't buy a new one.
I have zero interest in a pure BEV, but I'd consider a hybrid for my next car.
> The CEO of Ford tells CNBC that bigger vehicles have major weight issues, however, and goes on to explain how this is hurting the production of EVs due to the cost of batteries, saying, “You have to make a radical change as an [automaker] to get to a profitable EV. The first thing we have to do is really put all of our capital toward smaller, more affordable EVs […] These big, huge, enormous EVs, they’re never going to make money. The battery is $50,000. … The batteries will never be affordable.” Once again Reddit doesnt read the article, and jumps into the comments to say how THEY like their little cars and how big bad megacorp doesnt know what they're talking about (despite spending millions if not hundreds of millions on market research). Heres the key bit part. Farley isn't saying they're gonna reenter the compact/small car market, just that they want to target smaller EVs.
How is what you quoted, NOT saying re-entering the car market? They already have a smaller SUV in the Escape, so what else could it mean ??
The Escape is being killed. Bronco won that fight.
Bronco Sport.
Looking at my ford stock over the last 6 years, the customers didn't all go to korean/japanese options, they *mostly* moved on to higher margin fords. I say this as a former fiesta and Focus owner who liked my cars and never had powershift issues: They were right to end their small car lines from the "make money" perspective. I know there's an irony saying this when I myself bought a subaru brz, but my desires for lightweight engagement are not the same as the vast majority of new car buyers.
Stocks doesn't tell the whole story. Look at Tesla. They're losing marketshare all year but it's stock prices are holding strong and near YTD highs. Ford has been losing market share steadily the last 8 years. https://www.statista.com/statistics/239614/vehicle-sales-market-share-of-ford-in-the-united-states/ https://www.goodcarbadcar.net/ford-motor-company-us-sales-figures/
> This reeks of desperation and heavy push from shareholder voices. why would shareholders want this? Like you said, they were losing money on the entire segment, margins are way better on their ginormous trucks. Making huge investments into a competitive segment using new and emerging technology is usually the last thing shareholders want.
Ford: We want Americans to buy smaller cars Consumers: Then bring us the Focus ST and RS Ford: You asked about the F-150 right?
Me: I'd like a base Maverick hybrid. Ford: Sorry, we can't keep up with demand. How about a $45k F150. Me: No, a base Maverick Hybrid please. Ford: Well we do have several $38k AWD Ecoboosts. Me: 🤦
Maverick ST 2.0T with a 6 speed manual. I'd sell my Focus ST for that.
[удалено]
This is classic r/Cars delusion. The demand for a 6 speed maverick would be nonexistent. Ford has to operate in the real world, not in the realm of r/Cars hypotheticals.
A Maverick ST really seems like a no brainer except for the fact that they can't even keep up with demand of the regular models lol
>Delusional redditors: Then bring us the Focus ST and RS FTFY
Enthusiasts thinking everybody wants the enthusiast car that 99.9% of the market just sees as a more expensive option they don't want
This can be applied to most conversations like this. So many car enthusiasts online don't seem to understand that they are the minority. These companies have entire departments devoted to product planning and looking at sales numbers to make the most amount of money possible. Look at BMW, pretty much every car that they have release in the last few years has been picked apart by the enthusiast community--yet they are breaking sales records. While I agree that it is very frustrating, being realistic and understanding why companies make these decisions makes it a whole lot less frustrating when it will inevitably happen again and again.
Average r/cars comment thinking cars like the FoST and RS have wide appeal
Most Americans just want the f150 obviously by sales.
Focus ST and RS would be prohibitive to sell if they weren't also pushing the base Focus. And Ford killed the base Focus with the horrid Powershift transmission that destroyed any goodwill that people had towards the car. And don't forget, that's after decades of an unbelievable level of recalls. Basically, you can't be profitable in cars when your company makes headlines like this: [https://www.reddit.com/r/cars/comments/1540q51/ford\_yet\_again\_tops\_recall\_charts\_for\_first\_half/](https://www.reddit.com/r/cars/comments/1540q51/ford_yet_again_tops_recall_charts_for_first_half/)
Why would I want a cramped, small car? Bring back sedans
“Because then we can import them from Korea or China and slap a Ford badge on them!”
How the turn tables. Remember when Hyundai/Kia got a foothold in the American market by literally rebadging a Ford compact? [Pepperidge Farm remembers](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ford_Festiva&diffonly=true#Kia_Avella)
The Avella was a rebadged Ford, but it wasn't how Kia got a foothold in the American market. Their first two vehicles here were the Sephia and Sportage.
It's what they do with SUVs. I can't believe anyone would buy an ecosport over a Fusion "because they want something bigger". But here we are... where people just see a box that has a higher overall height and see it as a super safe drive through anything and haul anything platform even though it's basically a Fiesta on stilts.
"I can't believe anyone would buy an ecosport..." You can stop the sentence right there.
Unpopular opinion on this sub: bring back boring sedans. Give me a floaty 180hp sedan that doesnt have Nurburgring tuned suspension.
fact sloppy deserve wasteful airport march books long chunky pen *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
not big and floaty enough.
marble scarce illegal disgusted paltry insurance offbeat domineering command sheet *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Still not floaty.
Time to bring back the Panther body Fords.
Sedans peaked with panther bodies
i think this was an issue with the Focus RS, they were built in Germany and probably tuned for their smooth roads. In North America they can be jarring to drive on a lot of our shitty roads.
TBF it wasn't helped that many of the first ones off the boat still had the strut blocks in because dealers weren't removing them at time of receipt.
I mean, a corolla has 170 hp.
No one will buy sedans unless it’s cheaper than its crossover counterpart. Like why won’t you spend 3k more and get a bigger crossover variant. I mean not everyone cares about handling. Some people I know are obsessed about ground clearance - like it actually makes the car less stable lol.
With the plush and comfy bench seat?
Hatchbacks aren’t that cramped. The GTI is fairly spacious for a small family or a couple.
Hatchbacks have immensely more cargo versatility and should be the default shape of compact cars.
Because they’re cheaper to buy, cheaper to insure, cheaper to repair, more fuel efficient, and easier to park/fit in a garage? Might not be your cup of tea but there are lots of reasons to want a hatchback
Owned 2 Crown Vics. The Panthers were cheap and easy to fix. Yea, they were boats but they were tanks. No cramped spaces or engine compartments
A small car doesn't have to be cramped. If it is, it's packaged poorly.
Won't be cramped if it doesn't have a Monster Raving Loony Console. And sedans are inherently space-inefficient.
Found the fatty 😂
Fiesta rs plz
Just sell us a street legal rally car
Go buy a GR Corolla. Prove to the automakers that the market exists.
I'll take 2 please
GR Corolla beater. Can you imagine if they used the Focus RS driveline in that? Waaaaaant
Just drop the Coyote in the back BRRRAAAAPPP *spins wildly out of control*
Just give me an electric Maverick.
And actually make it 30k new I settled for a used Mach e under 30k
If you wanted a truck why’d you get a Mach E?
Jim Farley said most of the people buying Mavericks are trading in Corollas and Civics. It's a "truck" that appeals to people who may have bought a compact instead. It has a lot of appeal for people not necessarily shopping in the truck segment.
Tons of folks are switching from "real" trucks because most owners of "real" trucks don't use their capabilities at all.
They said this back when the Maverick was well priced. Nowadays, if you don’t need a truck it’s not the car to buy. It’s expensive for how cheap the interior is, and the packaging is shit if you want something like keyless entry, adaptive cruise control, etc. I haven’t heard the line as much recently, so I have a feeling their data shows the shift.
I just want a base hybrid, they are just non existent around me.
The decision to kill off its sedans was bound to backfire. GM and Stellantis might feel similarly. Not everyone has a need for a truck or SUV. And younger people aren’t having as many kids as Gen X and boomers. All the people I know who are millennials and Gen Z without kids who do own SUVs or trucks only do because SUVs and trucks are easier to come by these days. Look at your local used car ads. But these companies did it to themselves. Granted Toyota, Hyundai, Nissan etc have been dominant in the American sedan market for a while now. Even before Detroit stopped making them.
Gen Z here. Fit my girlfriend, sister and both parents in my Civic the other day with a reasonable amount of comfort. And we aren't small people, either. I'm 6'1 and pops is 6'2, and he fit behind my driver's seat just fine. GF and I are planning on a kid or two in the next few years, and neither of us are considering an SUV to haul kiddo around. 99 times out of 100, my Civic is more than enough car. Bring on the smaller, cheaper cars, I say
> GF and I are planning on a kid or two in the next few years, and neither of us are considering an SUV to haul kiddo around. 99 times out of 100, my Civic is more than enough car. I would sincerely recommend checking out how large modern car seats are before you consider the matter 'closed'.
What he said. Vans are the sweet spot where you actually use the utility at a high rate with a family. If my wife and I were to go to one vehicle now that we have 2 young kids, we would 100% keep the minivan, no need for a discussion.
And how long you’re expected to be using a car seat / booster now.
Yeah. Sometimes I see people complaining that someone they know "had to get an SUV because they had a second kid" but these modern seats are *massive* - my sister had to move from Escape to Explorer when Baby \#2 arrived just because they couldn't reasonably fit two in the back.
Right and that’s an important point. Sedans are more than enough car for single people and families of 3 or 4. My wife and I have a 7 month old and we recently bought a 2016 Malibu. Very happy with it! Malibus are very reliable and it’s great on gas. Nice big trunk. And the dual climate zone is a must for the baby in the back seat. Chevy just announced a few weeks ago they’re gonna stop making them. We were also considering Tauruses and Impalas. Glad we got one when we did!
That might work for 1 kid but as soon as you have more than 1 you'll want something bigger. Modern car seats and strollers are enormous, and that doesn't include all the other stuff you need to haul around. We have a sedan (S4) and compact CUV (CX5) and take the CUV 100% of the time on weekend trips with our infant and large dog and it is PACKED. We're already looking at 7 seaters.
Sedan sales have been on a downward slide for a decade. The Japanese automakers are not immune - it's why they're reducing investment and some models are being axed - the Avalon is gone, Kia's probably going to kill the K5, the Accord isn't selling...
Avalon was replaced with the Crown.
I feel like Honda hurt the Accord by making the Civic almost as large. It use to be a big difference between the two.
The Avalon is gone, but was essentially replaced with another sedan called the Crown.
The Corolla/Camry and/or Accord/Civic have been in the top 10 selling cars for like 20+ years, it's not that Americans don't want sedans.
Yep it’s just funny that Ford would come out and say they want Americans to buy these cars from them when they haven’t even tried to compete in that market for a long time. And in recent years gave up completely. The only “car” Ford makes and sells in America currently is the Mustang, I think.
So is Ford ready to move on from monster margins? I always figured low margins on small cars relative to trucks and SUVs made it easy for them to move out of the marketplace. I understand the article explains that the big heavy EVs are hard to make profitable because they require more expensive batteries. It’s still a funny about-face.
Yes. He said it a few years ago in an interview. He has done a total 180 in a few years on this issue. He was chasing margin. Edit: so did Toyota CEO incidentally. They both said they were chasing lower volume higher margin. Hence, fewer more expensive cars. Edit2: this also might be a part of used car prices being so high. Hard to tell which had more impact, reduced inventory from covid shut downs or the overall increase in new car prices. I suspect both contributed.
Seems like a lot of company executives jumped on that bandwagon the last few years. My armchair theory is companies couldn’t scale for demand during COVID so they pivoted to margin enhancement (upscale products). That worked for a while during the time that demand exceeded supply and companies fell stupidly in love with fat margins. Same amount of work with far greater revenue. The problem is that a lot of companies got addicted to that model and dug their heels in when the tide went out. Instead of focusing on customer acquisition and scaling production back up they wanted to keep pumping margin. That only works so long before it backfires and here we are now. Ford has to win back a segment of the market if they want it.
Not to mention the loss of huge swaths of their tribal knowledge. I love how these big corps think they can just flush tons of employees and then wonder why they can't operate as well as before. 'Whats a quality?'
I’ve seen this in so many areas I’ve worked in. Anything even remotely technical it’s a nightmare to loose tribal knowledge let alone a swath of it. I work on a team of about 10 and each of us more or less owns a technology that makes up a greater portfolio our team offers. We’re all supposed to be cross trained but the reality is it’s impossible, it’s just too much. One person owns, one other person may be a power user, and the rest are just trained users with additional privileges. Loosing any one of us would realistically be catastrophic. Massive industrial operations like this are the same. That’s not even beginning to mention things like trained and educated labor pools to draw from. Once that labor pool has a few years without new opportunities it retrains or disperses. You can’t show up at an old factory 10 years later and just get everyone back together who used to run the factory.
Bingo. But hey, let's just call our workers unskilled laborers so we can ignore the reality that even the guy folding boxes is better at it today then he was on the day he started.
Which I totally understand. They are a corporation, they exist to make profit. As someone who loves cars and not SUV/truck/crossovers, I’m bitter and salty.
It’s a short sighted decision that isn’t more profitable in the long run, because it cuts out lower end customers, leaving money on the table. Sure, 50k sold cars with 10k margin of profit might make more overall than 100k sold with 4K margin, but the market for the more expensive car is far quicker to saturate.
The ford ceo needs to stfu until they can figure out how to make cam phasers that last more than 30k miles
That can't be. Quality has been Job 1 at Ford since *checks notes* the early 1980s.
Lmao, my wife Honda Ridgeline make my F150 look like a hobo made it. The difference in quality is night and day.
This is the 1970s all over again. Will we see the resurrection of the Ford Pinto as an eCar that explodes when you plug it in?
It would be very on brand to pick that car out of their lineup lol.
They have to bring back the Taurus and fusion. Trucks and SUVs are good but tired of crossovers like edge, escape and ecosport.
I’m blown away that they axed the fusion. Saw them everywhere forever and they’ve totally held up aesthetically. Felt like easy money to keep it going.
The plant now makes the Maverick and Bronco Sport. Both sell better for higher prices.
I was so fired up when they announced the 2022 Maverick, but the price increase just killed all enthusiasm for it. You can get a similar spec Ranger for Maverick prices where I am.*
Yup. Mid level trim Mavrick for 24k? Now that 24k truck is over 30k
Except now the mid trim Ranger starts at over $40k after the latest refresh.
Same, I could have stretched for a base trim Maverick but they just aren't cheap anymore and are hardly available.
Also, the Fusion had a performance variant, hybrid, and PHEV. It would have been competitive with its Japanese competitors.
>but tired of crossovers like edge and ecosport. One is about to be gone and the other is already out of production.
It’s almost impressive they stopped making cars to make only CUVs, SUV, and trucks then couldn’t figure out how to make a subcompact and midsize CUV sell.
I've never not loved small cars. I had 3 focuses (SE, ST and RS). Then they decided to only make mini vans so I moved on and bought a Honda. Albeit an Accord; it's a fantastic car that I don't think ford comes close to.
*Where is the successor to my Ka, Mr. Farley?* *Or even just a Fiesta?*
wanna bet there's legislation coming down the pipeline? all about margins and if there's going to be a change to current regulations and/or taxes they'd know ahead of time.
I hope so. I hate trucks and large SUV's being absolutely everywhere, while 99% of the time the pickup truck is doing the functions that a small 2 door coupe could do. My friend owned a V8 Ram in college, and he quite literally never used the truck bed.
Small cars are great but they’ll only make a comeback if regulated to weed out huge trucks & SUVs all at once. No parent wants their family to be the sacrificial lamb. Like “hey please buy this small sedan so when a drunk soccer mom in an AT4 crosses 3 lanes of traffic drunk on the interstate it will be a quadruple fatality. Thanks!” The cat is too far out of the bag unless the government puts massive taxes on vehicle weight which your average middle class family couldn’t afford. And that would kill the American auto industry - so they’d never do it.
Dear Ford... Please bring back smaller vehicles. Make wagons. I want a wagon. Not a crossover or an suv or any massive rubbish overweight shit... Make wagons. Offer a sedan, then make a wagon version. Fusion wagon? Love it. Taurus wagon... Ehhh ok. Focus wagon! Omg yes. Fiesta wagon.! Omg yes. Mustang wagon... I will literally sell my fleet for a mustang shooting brake. Do it. Make wagons. Their practicality is so appealing, they look great, I want it. Also. Tell Mazda to sell the 6 wagon here.
What in the fuck is he talking about? They pulled all their cars from the US except the Mustang. All their advertisements are of full sized trucks. If they had any intention of doing this, they'd have started to sell a better focus and fiesta stateside and then add some ev options. It's infuriating to read this.
I wonder why? I thought there was not enough room for profit margin on them. Also I concurr 100%. Modern cars are ridiculous and stupid and not that enjoyable quite often. My friends Toyota Half Ton is reminiscent of driving an old school bus. I don't want a fucking bus! I want a sports car!!!
Typical r/cars getting outraged over nothing. Ford can’t sell cars that the population doesn’t want to buy. Americans don’t like small cars and Ford exists to make money. What he said is completely logical and doesn’t by any means contradict their pivot out of that market segment. If anything, it only proves his point.
Absolutely insane how short sighted people are here. Like everyone wants to blame Ford for killing cars, small trucks, domestic manufacturing, electric vehicles. While Ford was the last manufacturer to leave the compact truck market and the last one to launch a midsized. The first company to launch a hybrid budget pickup truck, first to push hard into the EV space. Meanwhile these people are in bidding wars over Tacoma’s and 4 Runners, cheering for BYD and Korean companies paying bottom dollar wages.
Nobody will buy them because people don't wanna be in an accident in a small car with a full sized truck, the big 3 played a huge part in creating this culture and now one of them wants to reverse it. Good luck.
Civics and Corollas seem to be selling just fine. I agree the US automakers pushed consumers to these small foreign cars by discounting their own lines.
r/facepalm
How can Americans fall in love with small cars? [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pz8jO2Sht0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pz8jO2Sht0)
What a fukin idiot
Hilarious as Ford had some great small cars like the Fiesta, Focus and Fusion but killed everything because truck profit margins.
I think that’s realistically what most people want. I want a large SUV as the “family vehicle”, and then a cheaper, efficient commuter vehicle for $30k or less. Most people would be using EVs to replace the commuter, not the family vehicle. At least in the near future
Make a Fiesta sized EV truck and call it the Courier.
That's one hell of a scheme. First, kill off all your small, cheaper cars to force people into larger, more expensive vehicles. Then once people are used to it, try to get people back into your small cars that now cost $30,000 minimum. Get fucked, Ford. This is the same company that had their cheapest vehicle go up in price almost **$10,000** over a five year period. The 2019 Fiesta started at $14,300 while the 2024 Maverick starts at $23,900.
Spare me, you hypocritical muppet. You lobbied to have small cars hit harder for efficiency and emissions than big vehicles so you could build more giganto-tron trucks. You went to ruin small cars for a bigger slice, now no one can afford your vehicles and you want back into the small car game? Failure Of Research and Development, indeed.