The head of Navistar’s Eastside diesel complex is worried that its 1,600 employee plant is going to lose its contract with Ford. If they can’t keep the contract with Ford than they will be forced to shutdown the 70 year old factory.
“The real key is: How do we keep the Ford business? If we don’t have it, there’s no plant there,” said Dan Ustian, Navistar chairman, in a conference call with reporters and industry analysts. “We’re going to do everything possible to keep that business.”
The United Auto Workers(UAW)have come to terms with GM’s President, Ron Gettelfinger, and are now ready to get on the same page with Ford Motor Co. and Chrysler. They believe that they have the ability to reach a suitable agreement all at once.
The GM agreement, which includes a union fund that would take future health-care obligations off the automaker’s books, may serve as a pattern. The UAW indefinitely extended contracts at Ford and Chrysler on Sept. 13 to focus on Detroit-based GM, with the idea of extending terms to the other automakers.
When picking out a car most people look at what model they want and they won’t often want to buy it if it doesn’t come in the color that they like. White, black, red, and silver are usually the only colors that are offered for any vehicle. Ford Motor Co. Nearly 40% of consumers will walk out of a dealership if it doesn’t have a vehicle they want in the precise color they want, according to research by Ford Motor Co.
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.
Ford motor company has been in deep thought and must decide soon whether or not they will be making a next generation Ranger. The Ranger and other compact pick-up trucks are made at the Twin Cities plant located in Minnesota, which is planning to close late next year. Ford has decided to close the plant in order to follow with the Way Forward North America restructuring plan.
Ford could design a new Ranger and build it at another of its flexible manufacturing plants. Or the automaker could take advantage of its pickup plant in Thailand, the second-biggest pickup market in the world, after the U.S. The problem is that, in the absence of a free trade agreement between the two countries, high tariffs on trucks exported from Thailand to the U.S. essentially wipe out potential profits.