Ford Motor Company's customizations

From the car company that didn't need a bail-out:


Ford's pimp-my-ride plan

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Mustang buyers will soon be able to get flames on their fenders right from the dealer, no fancy artistic skills needed.

Ford Motor Co. is bringing out a line of custom vinyl graphics car buyers can order to give their car or truck the appearance of a custom paint job without the paint.

The carmaker originally launched the Web site, fordcustomgraphics.com, back in November, but it only offered graphics for the Fiesta subcompact car which goes on sale in a few weeks.

The site will soon begin offering graphics for the Ford Mustang and the F-150 truck, both popular vehicles which are commonly customized by owners, Ford announced Wednesday.

"You click on your vehicle and its exterior color, select the graphics you like, and the Web site will show you exactly how the designs will look on your car or truck," said Jim Abraham, Ford's licensed accessories manager, in a company announcement.

Read the rest for details. Plans are to have graphics available for all other Ford models by the end of the year, with about 50 designs created for each model.


Also see: Fordcustomgraphics.com
     

"Reality Check" for USA is long overdue

Whether it's passing failing students through the education system and letting them graduate, uneducated and unemployable, or bailing out failing auto industries instead of letting them be replaced with non-failing ones, it's the same thing. Postponing reality only makes your reality check much harsher when it finally, unavoidably arrives.

Postponing Reality

Some of us were raised to believe that reality is inescapable. But that just shows how far behind the times we are. Today, reality is optional. At the very least, it can be postponed.

Kids in school are not learning? Not a problem. Just promote them on to the next grade anyway. Call it "compassion," so as not to hurt their "self-esteem."

Can't meet college admissions standards after they graduate from high school? Denounce those standards as just arbitrary barriers to favor the privileged, and demand that exceptions be made.

Can't do math or science after they are in college? Denounce those courses for their rigidity and insensitivity, and create softer courses that the students can pass to get their degrees.

Once they are out in the real world, people with diplomas and degrees-- but with no real education-- can hit a wall. But by then the day of reckoning has been postponed for 15 or more years. Of course, the reckoning itself can last the rest of their lives.

The current bailout extravaganza is applying the postponement of reality democratically-- to the rich as well as the poor, to the irresponsible as well as to the responsible, to the inefficient as well as to the efficient. It is a triumph of the non-judgmental philosophy that we have heard so much about in high-toned circles.

[...]

Detroit and Michigan have followed classic liberal policies of treating businesses as prey, rather than as assets. They have helped kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. So have the unions. So have managements that have gone along to get along.

Toyota, Honda and other foreign automakers are not heading for Detroit, even though there are lots of experienced automobile workers there. They are avoiding the rust belts and the policies that have made those places rust belts. [...]

It's worth reading the whole thing. Thomas makes an interesting comparison with the horse and buggy industry, and the businesses supporting horses and horse-transportation, that were displaced by the automobile. There were no bail-outs or stimulus packages for them. Somehow, everyone adapted without a diaper-changing government spending tax dollars to keep dying industries going.

People have no respect for "easy" money that they don't earn. Government has no respect for our money, because they don't earn it. The government doesn't need to reform the auto industry (the free market is doing that), the Government itself needs to be reformed. From the WSJ:

Let's 'Restructure' Washington While We're at It
Congress is at least as unresponsive to consumer demand as Detroit.

Congress has been suitably tough in its advice to Detroit, calling for "a complete restructuring" of our failing auto makers. But how about restructuring Washington? The federal government is a giant Rube Goldberg machine that not only wastes hundreds of billions of dollars each year but also burdens local governments and the private sector with legal requirements that no longer serve the public good. Congress should take its own advice and retool Washington. Here's how:

[...]

- Streamline management. The federal government employs about 2.5 million civilians (including the Post Office), about 10 times the number directly employed in the U.S. by Detroit. The bloat is legendary. In his study on "thickening government," NYU Prof. Paul Light found that some government agencies have 32 layers of management, compared to five layers in most well-run companies.

Civil-service rules make hiring an ordeal and firing practically impossible. Rigid job classifications are far more onerous than UAW work rules, guaranteeing massive inefficiency. At many federal agencies, people shuffle back and forth, passing paper from one level to the next, doing nothing useful. Civil service needs to be overhauled.

- Make products that the public wants. Congress is in the business of making and revising laws. But it almost never goes back and reviews unintended consequences. Pick up any volume of the U.S. Code and ask yourself whether the detailed provisions of that law make sense today.

Take something relatively innocuous, like the requirement in the 1996 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act to maintain the privacy of patient information. One effect is lots of forms -- over $1 billion worth annually. Compliance also stifles important activity: For example, research on heart-attack recovery at the University of Michigan slowed to a crawl when only one-third of the sample bothered to complete the necessary HIPAA paperwork.

- Enhance competitiveness. Washington's failures are far more significant to the economy than Detroit's. The federal government not only is over seven times larger than Detroit in annual expenditures but it also establishes the legal platform on which the entire U.S. economy operates. The legal infrastructure that Congress has provided is a huge, internally inconsistent mess, requiring businesses, hospitals and schools to negotiate a maze of legal detours. Day-to-day, teachers, doctors, business managers and government officials are unable to make sense of ordinary choices. Law has effectively removed the freedom needed to take responsibility. [...]

There's more suggestions, with examples, it's worth reading the whole thing. One thing they mentioned that I didn't excerpt was farm subsidies. They may well be worth reforming, but I'd be VERY careful about cutting or reforming funding to something as essential as our food supply. But the rest is an excellent comparison of our government to the failing automakers. They suffer from the same problems. Both are strangling from bureaucrats, unions and needless paperwork. In both cases, major reforms are needed.
     

Totally electric cars not viable any time soon

I'm all for "green" technology, but only when it actually works. At this point in time, the best "green" cars we can make won't be electric ones. Consider this:

Politically inconvenient truth about electric cars

[...] Mr Sarkozy’s own government commissioned months ago one of France’s leading energy experts – Jean Syrota, the former French energy industry regulator – to draw up a report to analyse all the options for building cleaner and more efficient mass-market cars by 2030. The 129-page report was completed in September to coincide with the Paris motor show. But the government has continued to sit on it and seems reluctant to ever publish it.

Yet all those who have managed to glimpse at the document agree that it makes interesting reading. It concludes that there is not much future in the much vaunted developed of all electric-powered cars. Instead, it suggests that the traditional combustion engine powered by petrol, diesel, ethanol or new biofuels still offers the most realistic prospect of developing cleaner vehicles. Carbon emissions and fuel consumption could be cut by 30-40 per cent simply by improving the performance and efficiency of traditional engines and limiting the top speed to about 170km/hr. Even that is well above the average top speed restriction in Europe, with the notable exception of Germany. New so-called “stop and start” mechanisms can produce further 10 per cent reductions that can rise to 25-30 per cent in cities. Enhancements in car electronics as well as the development of more energy efficient tyres, such as Michelin’s new “energy saver” technology, are also expected to help reduce consumption and pollution.

Overall, the Syrota report says that adapting and improving conventional engines could enhance their efficiency by an average of 50 per cent. It also argues that new-generation hybrid cars combining conventional engines with electric propulsion could provide an interesting future alternative.

By combining electric batteries with conventional fuel-driven engines, cars could run on clean electricity for short urban trips while switching over to fuel on motorways. This would resolve one of the biggest problems facing all electric cars – the need to install costly battery recharging infrastructures. The report warns that the overall cost of an all-electric car remains unviable at around double that of a conventional vehicle. Battery technology is still unsatisfactory, severely limiting performance both in terms of range and speed. The electricity supply for these batteries would continue to come from mostly fossil sources.

The misgivings over the future of the electric car may explain why the French government appears to have spiked the report. It probably considers it politically incorrect [...]

This pretty much fits in with many of the things I've read. Improving conventional gas combustion cars to be more efficient, and improving hybrid cars until batter technology improves. If we are going to think seriously about having "greener" cars, we have to be PRACTICAL, by supporting what works, not POLITICALLY CORRECT by insisting on promoting technologies into the mainstream that cannot perform yet.

That is one of the things I find worrisome about our own Congress and their Auto Industry Bailout plans. Congress seems hell bent on forcing the introduction of electric cars, before the technology is good enough. They can throw a lot of our tax money down the drain on political correctness, forcing the mass production of inefficient, overpriced electric cars that no one will buy. No one can waste money like government can.

The suggestions in the French report for improving gas combustion engines would do a lot to help reduce carbon emissions, but it's being repressed in favor of an untenable solution. You have to wonder if the real motive isn't to reduce carbon emissions, but to reduce personal freedom and capitalism by restricting transportation choices?

Environmentalism is increasingly being used as an excuse to promote other, hidden political agendas by the Left. We must be wary, and carefully separate authentic environmentalism from the political kind.


Related Links:

Congressional Motor's New Car of the Future

Ford Motor Company is profitable - in Brazil
     

Ford Motor Company is profitable - in Brazil

It's one of the most advanced and efficient car manufacturing plants in the world, and they aren't begging for a bailout. It's worth noting the reasons why. Here is a 3 minute 33 second video of Ford's plant in Brazil:



They would like to build such efficient manufacturing plants here in the USA, but they can't, because of the stifling unions that won't allow changes in the manufacturing process. So American jobs continue to go overseas, and Americans won't buy cars with bloated prices due to extra costs created by union demands. So we need to bail-out the unionized auto-makers, so taxpayers can subsidize the unions and the cars they make that aren't selling?


Related Link:

South of the equator, Ford and GM prosper

Congressional Motor's New Car of the Future

From IowaHawk: Lemon.

It's in the way you dress. The way you boogie down. The way you sign your unemployment check. You're a man who likes to do things your own way. And on those special odd-numbered Saturdays when driving is permitted, you want it in your car. It's that special feeling of a zero-emissions wind at your back and a road ahead meandering with possibilities. The kind of feeling you get behind the wheel of the Pelosi GTxi SS/Rt Sport Edition from Congressional Motors.

All new for 2012, the Pelosi GTxi SS/Rt Sport Edition is the mandatory American car so advanced it took $100 billion and an entire Congress to design it. We started with same reliable 7-way hybrid ethanol-biodeisel-electric-clean coal-wind-solar-pedal power plant behind the base model Pelosi, but packed it with extra oomph and the sassy styling pizazz that tells the world that 1974 Detroit is back again -- with a vengeance.

We've subsidized the features you want and taxed away the rest. [...]

Do follow the link and read the whole thing, it's deliciously rude!


Related Links:

SO THE AUTO BAILOUT IS DEAD ... FOR NOW

Let the Automakers Fail - and be Reborn
     

Let the Automakers Fail - and be Reborn

It's ok to let them fail, because they won't disappear. They will go through bankrupcy, re-structure, and return to business without the unions that are currently choking them to death. George will explains:

In Detroit, Failure's a Done Deal

WASHINGTON -- "Nothing," said a General Motors spokesman last week, "has changed relative to the GM board's support for the GM management team during this historically difficult economic period for the U.S. auto industry." Nothing? Not even the evaporation of almost all shareholder value?

GM's statement comes as the mendicant company is threatening to collapse and make a mess unless Washington, which has already voted $25 billion for GM, Ford and Chrysler, provides up to $50 billion more -- the last subsidy until the next one. The statement uses the 11 words after "team" to suggest that the company's parlous condition has been caused by events since mid-September. That is as ludicrous as the mantra that GM is "too big to fail." It has failed; the question is what to do about that.

The answer? Do nothing that will delay bankrupt companies from filing for bankruptcy protection, so that improvident labor contracts can be unraveled, allowing the companies to try to devise plausible business models. Instead, advocates of a "rescue" propose extending to Detroit the government's business model for the nation -- redistributing wealth from the successful to the failed, an implausible formula for prosperity. [...]

We must not throw good money after bad by rewarding failure. Read the rest, to see how the unions of the big three automakers are strangling them. The other automakers in the US do not have their problems, they don't need a bail-out, because they don't have these choking unions.

The Democrats were heavily supported by the Unions in our recent elections. While it would be hard for the Dems to say "no" to an automakers bail-out, they had better be very careful. If they start throwing massive amounts of taxpayers money into a never ending black hole, in financial times like these, it could come back to bite them in the next election. It will be interesting to see how they are going to handle this.