Ford Faqs

Ford is finding out the hard way that they are having a hard time keeping up with their sales percentage the way they should be. In trying to fix that they have been reducing sales and will be doing it once more next year.

George Pipas, a Ford sales analyst, explained that the automaker will continue to cut its sales to rental fleets in 2008, but not to the extent that it did this year. In 2007, Ford Motor Company decreased the amount of vehicles offloaded to rental lots by 30-percent, or 135,000 units.

Navistar International is sueing Ford Company for stealing a Navistar designed engine. they say that Ford owes them hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation and damages. 

Navistar says it spent $11 million designing the engine that was to have been built in Europe and used overseas before Ford lost interest. In a lawsuit filed in Chicago, Navistar accused Ford of breaching a 2002 contract to produce a 3.6-liter diesel engine known as the Lion V-8.

The lawsuit claims Ford plans to build its own version of the Lion V-8 in Mexico. Ford said the claims were “entirely without merit.”

The official sales figures for brand new foreign cars in Russia in the first quarter of 2007 will be released by the Association of European Businesses. According to information obtained by Kommersant, Ford has remained the market leader, Chevrolet held on to second place, and Hyundai overtook Toyota in third place.

A new competitor in the rankings was the Chinese automaker Chery, which snatched 12th place from Germany’s Volkswagen. The overall growth in sales of foreign models in 2006 was 73%, and experts predict that 2007 will be another record year. Kommersant has obtained preliminary data from the Association of European Businesses (the AEB AMC division brings together foreign automakers) on sales figures for new foreign-made automobiles in Russia for the first quarter of 2007.

Ford Motor Company has decided to conduct a voluntary recall of its very own Crown Victoria police package Interceptor model because of small cracks that could form in the car’s steel wheels during high speed chases. These cracks could cause “rapid air loss,” or what the street folk call a blow-out, effectively allowing the no-goodnicks to get away and obviously putting the officer behind the wheel in an incredible amount of danger.

About 109,664 examples of the 2003 to 2005 models will be recalled, though it’s suspected that a very small percentage of active duty cop cars actually are rolling on defective wheels. Only two crashes have been connected to the issue and no officers were injured.

The Ford Motor Company has decided to end the production of the $150,000 Ford GT high-performance sports car this year after only two model years. The car was intended for a short run, according to Ford. The end of production this year is timed to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the famous first, second and third place finish of the original Ford GT40 cars, on which the car is closely modeled, in the 1966 LeMans race.