Maybe the area you are visiting isn't the sort of place where Ford Mustangs and pick ups are to be found which seem to be good sellers elsewhere, maybe multiple reasons for this, ......

Certainly so. It's an affluent city of 300,000+ with an atypical socio-demographic. Very few pickups, pony cars, or Trump voters (the last is a guess.....;-) Typical aspirational vehicle is a Kia Telluride........

www.kia.com/sd/en/util/news/Kia-Telluride-wins-Tri...l

......IMHO possibly the ugliest SUV I have ever had the misfortune to clap eyes on.

I saw a report on Ford US the other day. They're trying to move towards a Tesla style direct sell method. Second dealers have been getting greedy with mark ups. Thirdly the Fiesta and Focus no longer available. The F150's starting now at 75k or thereabouts. Oddly it's not selling much in the current economy. Luckily Jim Farley? Still getting his 21 million bucks every year. So that's OK. Some quality issues and price increases across the board. Oh and unsold F150's etc stock is piling up at the dealers. They've also lost 3 billion last year? Think that's the number. I guess people are realising ' Other manufacturers are available '.

Edited by Ethan Edwards on 15/09/2023 at 12:00

I'm sure I watched the YouTube, that's all I guarantee.

youtu.be/aH1eoQz9g14?si=tUKKdE01rxX1IFnW

Oh and a few others that reinforced those points.

Edited by Ethan Edwards on 15/09/2023 at 15:27

I'm sure I watched the YouTube, that's all I guarantee.

youtu.be/aH1eoQz9g14?si=tUKKdE01rxX1IFnW

Oh and a few others that reinforced those points.

Well, do you trust a YouTube video looking for people to watch and make money from or do you believe the sales figures...I'm going to go with the sales figures and let you have the YouTube.

Im sure sales figures can be manipulated to say whatever they want, so I wouldnt believe all thats been shown, Ford said they were doing well one month then said figures were wrong

The 2 CV was a contemporary of both the Morris 1000 launched in 1948 and the Beetle effectively launched post war (unveiled 1938).

But the mid 1960s all were starting to show their age despite updates. 20 years on by the mid 1980s they were well behind the competition. They may now be sought after classics - in 1985 they were obsolete rust buckets and mostly out of production in Europe.

I had a Citroen Dyane - basically a rebodied 2CV. Excellent in some respects, abysmally slow, but the engineering had evolved by the mid 1970s to be fairly fool proof.

Back to Ford - currently the Puma is a top seller along with the Fiesta in 9th position but just discontinued. Ford are nowhere in EV sales - they have a lot of catching up to do. Whether the strength of their brand will win out or they slowly die is open to debate.

The Chinese will romp ahead in battery car production and almost everything else industrially, they arn't foolish enough to strangle their own industries by denying them cheap plentiful coal fired power.

What happens in the US depends on whether Trump gets elected.

I get the impression that in China as a largely "command" economy, if the project fits with the political plan any barriers are simply removed by decree.

Looks as though Ford are in bed with Changan (with the Chinese in control) building EVs in a vast city many times bigger than New York or London (Chongquing) which I doubt many in the 'west' will have heard of.