Farewell to the Ford Taurus
October 23, 2006The same week that Ford announces a nearly $6 billion quarterly loss is also going to be the week that the last Ford Taurus rolls off the assembly line. Fitting in a way that these two events should be linked. The Taurus saved Ford twenty years ago, and the neglect Ford showed towards sedans like the Taurus is largely the reason they’re struggling with such enormous losses today.
Instead of improving the Taurus to keep it competitive with the Honda Accord and the Toyota Camry, Ford chose to focus on SUV’s. They made the Explorer ever larger and less fuel efficient, they built the mega-SUV’s like the Expedition and the Excursion, all the while letting the Japanese chip away at the family sedan and small-truck/small-SUV markets.
It’s not like nobody knew eventually there would be a rise in gas prices. We’ve all known for decades that the combination of dwindling domestic supplies and increasingly unstable Middle East supplies would have to trigger some pricing problems eventually. But Ford just decided to ignore all that and keep on churing out highly profitable gas-guzzlers. And when the inevtiable happened, when those gas guzzlers became the dinosaurs everybody knew them to be, Ford was not ready to make the switch and keep up with changes in the marketplace. Which let Toyota supplant Ford as the number 2 car maker in the US.
Man I hope that Ford makes it back from the brink. But the process is going to be far more painful than it had to be. Because of their short-sighted leaders who could only see the near-term profits from huge trucks but could not see the long-term costs of ignoring fuel-efficient sedans and SUV’s.