Ford is really taking it in the shorts....

http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/Investing/Dispatch/FordReportsWorstEverLoss .aspx

Do you mean better as in quality, or better as in "what the people want"? I think Ford quality in on par with most automakers, but in recent years they've put all their eggs in the basket of trucks and SUV's. These are the high profit cars they have grown financially addicted to. Three dollar plus gas prices and global awareness ("An Inconvenient Truth") have shifted the car market rapidly toward more fuel efficiency, and Ford was unready for it, or unwilling to make the adjustment, and now they're getting caught with their pants down.

Yeah, chalk it up to short-sightedness and lack of vision on Ford's part. Not like GM is that much better off. Toyota on the other hand is a company with vision; their goal is to convert *ALL* of their cars to hybrids in the next decade. Meanwhile, they will keep improving the battery technology, making their hybrids more and more fuel efficient. Honda is doing similar things. The American automakers are way behind. Who knows if they will catch up?

I feel no sympathy for Ford and GM, honestly - their own stupidity led to their current predicament. Sad for the country, though, that soon the world's #1 automaker will be a Japanese company.

Andrew

GM shifted gears from the gas/electric hybrid developement to fuel cell technology. They will be one of the front runners with vehicles alond this line! Fuel cell better in the long haul all things considered.

http://www.gm.com/company/gmability/adv_tech/index.html
http://www.gm.com/company/gmability/adv_tech/400_fcv/index.html

Edselehr, I'd agree with your statement I think Ford quality in on par with most automakers if we added the qualifier American to it.

As Andrew mentions above, Toyota will soon be the #1 automaker in the world. (They already are in my opinion). Their quality is far and above any American manufacturer. As is Subaru and Nissan.

We are a 4 Toyota family with a combined mileage of over 560,000 miles. My Land Cruiser has 287,000! I bought it with 256,000 and didn't give the mileage a second thought.

I won't buy anything unless it says Toyota on it!

Eerily similar to the late 70s through the mid-80s, where Honda and Toyota came in and dominated the US marketplace with less expensive, more fuel efficient, and just plain BETTER vehicles. (What was coming out of Detroit at that time was 98% pure junk. Does the Chrysler K series ring a bell anyone?)

Out of our three household vehicles, only ONE is American made, that being my Saturn.

My wife is currently reading a book called " How to Live Well Without Owning A Car" by Chris Balish. Subtitled "Save money, breathe easier, and get more mileage out of life."

First off the book does say this is not for everyone but it does talk about using mass transit, or going "Car light" which we do.

Not only do we need better made cars we simply need to find ways to use them less. One of the reasons my wife and I enjoy living in the urban area is we can easily access mass transit. Working from home helps, plus the added exercise and thinking as if we don't have a vehicle.

We've been a one car family for well over 10 years and our next vehicle will be some kind of a hybrid. But for now I'm keeping our mini-van in great condition and using it as little as possible.

So not only better cars we need to be smarter about our usage.

Ford and GM both have a hugh millstone around their necks, called unions.

Skybill,

I empathize with your love of Toyotas. My first car was a 1971 Corolla and I did everything I could as a teenage driver to kill that car, but it kept running. And easy to work on (I could do a front brake job with just a pair of needlenose pliers). I've owned a couple of Toyotas since, but have steered toward pre-'70s cars because they are unique, easy to maintain and you get a lot of car for the money. Mileage isn't super great, but even my big V-8 cars can get in the high teens to almost 20mpg when tuned and driven properly. This is about the same as what the minivans and SUV's on the road get today.

As for being environmentally sound, I feel I'm doing my part by keeping a car on the road rather than scrapping it, which would require a new one be manufactured for me. The environmental damage and pollution created by simply manufacturing a new car is significant.

Edselehr, I'm with you on the pre-70's cars.

That's when the American car makers still had a quality product.

There's nothing better than the sound of a big V-8 with a 4 barrel carb or maybe even dual 4 barrels and a well tuned exhaust system with NO catalytic converters!

My first car was a hand me down from my parents. It was a 1964 Oldsmobile F-85 Station Wagon. I put good snow tires (there was no such thing as an all terrain tire back then) on the back of it and it did quite well off road! It was an awesome car. I drove it to the junk yard and burned rubber on every corner!

I replaced it with a 1977 Dodge Tradesman 200. What a piece of junk. In the 2 day less than 2 years I had it, I paid more to keep it on the road than I did against the loan!

I like the muscle cars too. I'd love to have a Barracuda like Don Johnson had on Nash Bridges or a '67 or '68 Camaro. Although what I would give my eye teeth for is a '63 split window Corvette!

I'm in the same camp where keeping existing cars on the road is concerned.

I look at new cars today and the amount of oil required to manufacture them is huge! The hybrids, in particular, probably do not return enough savings to overcome their initial petrocost.

We've gotta advance the tech, so don't take that the wrong way. Hybrids will get cheaper, or we will figure out other fuel sources. All of that is a necessary part of the process.

I have heard pros and cons though. Some say the older cars consumption and pollution outweigh the manufacturing burden of newer cars. With mine at least, I know the consumption bit is just not true. It averages 35 MPG or so, and can be nudged over 40, if one works at it.

Pollution I've no idea on. I suspect the reality to be we are still burning bad stuff to get around and the number of burners is only increasing. Real change will come with a move away from either bad fuels or combustion.

One trend I find interesting is the sourcing of a lot of shared components for cars, both domestic and foreign. Got stuck with an Impala on a rental that had dash controls seen in a Honda of the same vintage.

you can look at beginning-of-life issues for cars (manufacture, petrocost, pollution, etc) but must alwo look at the end of life issues as well. When the car finally makes it to the big wrecking yard in the sky, as 99+% of them do, what happens to them? I believe the older car is more recyclable than the newer one simply due to the relative simplicity of components. We keep hearing about the difficulty of recycling old computers with the heavy metals, etc. embedded in them. Well what about todays cars, with are essentially rolling computers that also have catalytic converters, many more plastics, rubbers, etc. For older cars you could pull the interior and tires and the rest could be crushed and melted down for scrap. How do they scrap out today's cars? Is it even possible to recover the use of many of the components, or do the non-metal parts just end up in a landfill? And with new fuel technologies, especially electrics, what is done with spent batteries? These end-of-use issues were not properly anticipated with computers, and I feel we will have the same problems with new automotive technologies.

After some consideration, I think older cars win out across the board. The smaller engine models made from the late 80's to early 90's are just sweet.

They are composed of materials that are easier to recycle, have good solid economy, and are still well within the limits of your average person repairing them.

I've also reached a point where I really don't like a lot of electronics in cars. Some minimal stuff for ignition and emissions appears to be a great value add, but the rest of it is just waste.

Electric cars bother me for this reason. Maybe we will find them to be more robust than I think they currently are. I've ny doubts though. Complexity is really high.

The thing about toyotas is that they are by and large, butt ugly of not bland. How many classic Toyotas can you name (except for perhaps the original land cruiser).
At least Datsun made one classic -- the 240Z.

American car makers are also guilty of designing bland and outright ugly cars -- GM and Ford at least made some vehicles that were a treat for the eyes. That's how I spend my money.

Hybrids,and small "econo" cars are all good,But kinda gutless. Too gutless for me,I need a car that has enough power to get out of it's -own- way!
I don't mind paying a few extra bucks for gas and getting a lower MPG figure,if it means more power under the pedal.

As for Toyotas, I thought the 1977 Celica fastback had some good, tough styling. Even the coupe of that era was (is) attractive. In retrospect, the pre-80s Toyotas have character not found in Toyotas since.

And has anyone heard this? Crank windows are going the way of the dodo. Most manufacturers within the next couple years will have power windows as standard, and many will not even bother offering a crank window option. But I LIKE crank windows, as long as they don't put the crank down near my ankles.

Is it time to rethink the whole idea of personal transportation?
Now the purpose of a car is to dp many things, only one of which is to get from point a to point b. We want it to entertain us, express our image, give us power. After all a 1964 Corvette is an uncomfortable ride, but ir is so Cool.

We want control.

Is it time to give all of that up, it would be fairly easy to build computer controlled autos, that drove themselves, connected with a network to ensure everyone got a smooth, fairly quick ride to their destination.

No more auto accidents, no more gridlock etc.

Yes, Nwokie, I can see it now...electronic controls for cars...elevated sidewalks to increase roadway safety and capacity...convenient landing platforms for my helicopter or autogyro.

"Come...let's travel into the Future...What Will We See??"

Part 1 -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74cO9X4NMb4


Part 2 -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WU7dT2HId-c

we'd better start thinking of something, when you consider their talking about 5billion to replace the I5 bridge, 10Billion for a bridge in Seattle etc.

There are some short term fixes, such as tax breaks for companies that offshift their hours, so their employees can comute during normally slow periods on the highways, or taxcharges for companies that insist their employees commute in peak hours.

it would be fairly easy to build computer controlled autos..

No thanks!

Have you seen how our computers operate?

If Bill Gates only had a nickel for every time Windows crashed he would...........Oh wait, he does!!

I hope that our future used cars are mostly hybrids.

If GM had developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be driving cars with the following characteristics:
1. Every time they repainted the lines on the road, you'd have to buy a new car.

2. Occasionally your car would just die on the motorway for no reason, and you'd have to restart it. For some strange reason, you'd just accept this, restart and drive on.

3. Occasionally, executing a manoeuvre would cause your car to stop and fail to restart and you'd have to re-install the engine. For some strange reason, you'd just accept this too.

4. You could only have one person in the car at a time, unless you bought a "Car 95" or a "Car NT". But then you'd have to buy more seats.

5. Amiga would make a car that was powered by the sun, was twice as reliable, five times as fast, twice as easy to drive - but it would only run on five percent of the roads.

6. Macintosh car owners would get expensive Microsoft upgrades to their cars which would make their cars go much slower.

7. The oil, engine, gas and alternator warning lights would be replaced with a single "General Car Fault" warning light.

8. People would get excited about the "new" features in Microsoft cars, forgetting completely that they had been available in other cars for many years.

9. We'd all have to switch to Microsoft gas and all auto fluids but the packaging would be superb.

10. New seats would force everyone to have the same size butt.

11. The airbag system would say "Are you sure?" before going off.

12. If you were involved in a crash, you would have no idea what happened.

13. They wouldn't build their own engines, but form a cartel with their engine suppliers. The latest engine would have 16 cylinders, multi-point fuel injection and 4 turbos, but it would be a side-valve design so you could use Model-T Ford parts on it.

14. There would be an "Engium Pro" with bigger turbos, but it would be slower on most existing roads.

15. Microsoft cars would have a special radio/cassette player which would only be able to listen to Microsoft FM, and play Microsoft Cassettes. Unless of course, you buy the upgrade to use existing stuff.

16. Microsoft would do so well, because even though they don't own any roads, all of the road manufacturers would give away Microsoft cars free, including IBM!

17. If you still ran old versions of car (ie. CarDOS 6.22/CarWIN 3.11), then you would be called old fashioned, but you would be able to drive much faster, and on more roads!

18. If you couldn't afford to buy a new car, then you could just borrow your friends, and then copy it.

19. Whenever you bought a car, you would have to reorganise the ignition for a few days before it worked.

20. You would need to buy an upgrade to run cars on a motorway next to each other.

I understand the soldier of the future is a robot. It better be a Mac or we are doomed.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCOlf_7BT-I

If you fly in a commercial airplane, its probably being flown by a computer.
The navy uses coumuterized systems to land aircraft on carriers.

Yep, and those computers have humans overseeing them.

I personally have three problems with computers and cars:

-the state of our understanding of software development is still primitive where fault tolerant systems are concerned

We can build these, but so far our only real successes are for specialized systems under strict control. These, in general, do not scale to the degree necessary for cars on auto-pilot.

-our legal system has not yet properly addressed many elementary issues where technology and society collide. Give Larry Lessig "Code" a read. It's licensed under the creative commons and can be downloaded.

Essentially, computer code is law where mandated software is concerned. If we are to build systems where computers are regulating behavior, we need to more fully define how we the American people, act in our traditional role of checks and balances. Systems that exhibit poor regulation currently are largely beyond public review. This is not ok and leaves us in a state where we are held subject to a rule set we have no effective representation in both it's creation and arbitration where conflicts are concerned.

eg: Current voting systems! We are not allowed to review these, even though our existing body of law clearly mandates said system to be open enough for this to happen. The primary cause of this is the DMCA, combined with trade law.

IMHO, open systems are a solid answer to this, but need some legal framework for it to actually happen in a solid way.

The biggest barriers to this are:

---conflict between a permissive society and the potential for control computer automated systems represent (we need additional law to properly carve out humans proper role in this)

---lack of technical understanding in both our law makers and the average joe American.

(Our representative system cannot function without solid education of those supposed to engage it)

There are lots of other examples, but not enough time...

-Given the above two are brought to some reasonable resolution (which is possible), we still need to address the issue of dependance and cost. Would such an automation deliver a solid return on investment? I seriously doubt this would be the case. This is a sizeable investment that could very easily be invested in other ways to make human controlled transport both cost effective and far safer than it is today.

Fatal Error.....Delete User!