Yahoo Autos Ford CEO: We’re Reinventing Cars, Not Killing Them
Ford executives say they’re not killing the car, they’re just “reinventing” it.
CEO Jim Hackett and chairman Bill Ford made that statement to clarify the announcement in their first-quarter report two weeks earlier, in which the automaker said it will drop all but two passenger cars from its U.S. lineup.
"This doesn’t mean we intend to lose those customers," Hackett now says, as quoted by Automotive News. "We want to give them what they’re telling us they really want. We’re simply reinventing the American car."
Executive chairman Bill Ford, whose family controls 40 percent of shareholder voting rights, said: “If you got beyond the headline, you’ll see we’re adding to our product lineup and by 2020 we’ll have the freshest showroom in the industry. The headlines look like Ford’s retreating. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.”
All Ford sedans and hatchbacks-Fiesta, Focus, Fusion, and Taurus-will be gone or replaced by new models in a gradual phaseout beginning this month. Only the Mustang and a crossover-style Focus variant, the Focus Active, will be sold alongside Ford’s crossovers, SUVs, and trucks. Hackett and Ford haven’t hinted what models will replace especially high-volume models including the Fusion and Focus, or said anything about the fate of Lincoln’s sedans and Ford Performance variants such as the Fiesta ST and Focus RS.
Really, no one outside Ford knows what the automaker is planning, except that the headlines aren’t misleading. The automaker is abandoning some of its most popular cars so that they may, in unclear terms, “evolve into something else,” as Ford told C/D. Whatever Ford develops to replace, say, the Fusion family sedan is supposed to be so appealing that it will prevent customers from deciding to buy a Honda Accord or Toyota Camry instead.
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