Ford CEO Mullaly said he is going to drive a hybrid to Washington this time.

I could not hear what he said in Japanese.
I've no clue what was his intention.

Ken@Japan

 

Um ... sleep very soundly, have perfect blood sugar control, based on my most recent A1C, and perfect blood pressure.

 

If you turn the sound up quite high, you can barely hear him speaking, but the translator obviously drowns out most of it.

This brings up a pet peeve of mine: instead of having an audio translation, which tends to overwhelm the original audio, why not just use captioning?

In the meantime, I'll keep my humorous mental image of the poor fellow who is still up at one in the morning, fiddling with the stone cold hot water heater, all while is wife is yelling at him and blaming him for the failure.

I've known a few married guys in the same situation. For some reason, most wives refuse to take ice cold showers

 

Forgive my cynicism and sarcasm, but for the amount of homework and foresight both GM and Ford have given to their product lines and future, I think they both should take a bus from Detroit to DC.

 

Is that because they do not have a "prius" type vehicle yet? what does toyota offer that detroit does not?

 

Thanks for the link, Ken. Some people in this thread are quick to blame the Japanese for 'stealing' our wealth, etc., but the bottomline is when you see a hard working regular guy like that truly LEADING his company, you can't really feel sorry for the sorry lot of Big 3 Execs who descended on Washington begging for money.

This guy took a pay cut and cut all his own benefits when the company was in hard times. On a regular day, he earns only slightly more than the professionals he employs. THAT GUY is going to have the entire company behind him when he makes decisions because he leads by example and he's 'one of them', be it riding the bus to work or eating in the cafeteria with the other workers.

The same simply can not be said about the Fat Cat Poseurs who have led the domestic auto industry to demise with bad decision after bad decision, and 'Me-First' greed.

About the last comment regarding the water heater, etc., I think the message is that he's got the same problems as everyone else... when pay is cut, there's less money at home, and when things break, it's harder to come up with the cash to get it fixed.

 

autoblitz: Ford accelerates electric-vehicle plans

of the 3, Ford has really been the only one to embrace hybrid technology. so its fitting that they are least in trouble. and first to announce an EV...

 

Chicago Auto Show: Ford Transit Connect Official For US Market

Most likely it'll be this van that'll be EVfied....

 

Nice. I hope they do it. Looks very practical.

 

Step 1: Completely understand the math of how the loan is structured to maximize your interest payment. Specifically, be sure you know how much less money you pay overall for 1 additional dollar payed today on the principal.

Step 2: Determine all the obstacles that that have been placed in the loan to stop what I am describing, such as needing specific documentation that may be needed to ensure that any money over the monthly payment go to reducing the prinicipal and not into escrow or some other non-principal bucket. The loan organizations have a LOT of mechanisms to make it very difficult to do this, including early payment penalties. (Note that the first step makes it clear that you may still come out ahead even with penalties.)

Step 3: Figure out how to get every cent you can, without creating any debt elsewhere, to pay off as much of the principal that can be managed in addition to the monthly payment. It can be done, but only with the dicipline and motivation provided by step 1.

Step 4: The extreme success of this will show up when the next amoritization schedule shows a big drop in the monthly payment....leaving you even more money to pay against the principal for this year.

Just one year of extra money to the principal can then accelerate breaking free of the loan sharking that is standard practice.

 

Thanks.

 

Thanks for posting that. I'll give it a go.

 

The wife and I have been working on a similar plan the past few years. We're hoping to be able to accelerate the principal reduction and pay off our mortgage within five years. Assuming we continue to have our jobs...

Back to Ford:

Detroit: How Ford Might Overtake GM and Chrysler | Newsweek Voices - Keith Naughton | Newsweek.com

 

It is the finance arm, GM and Chrylsers are not loaning, Ford's is still loaning. I think GMAC problem cost GM 50,000 + sales in November.

 

I hear that Cerberus bought Chrysler mainly for its financing business, and don't really care that much about the automotive side. Don't know how true that is. But if it's true, then it's no wonder that they're not jumping in to help out their auto division.

It's not like Cerberus is hurting for cash or anything...

 

Congress asked the same thing over the last two days. Specifically "If your parent company that has billions of cash laying around won't invest in Chrysler, why should the federal government"? Chrysler's CEO didn't have a good answer.

I see them being consolidated into GM. It seemed popular with congress with some wanting to make it a mandatory condition of the loans.

 

Chrysler was gutted by Daimler. An american company of that magnitude should be prohibited from being purchased by a foreign company in the future.

 

Not so much a 'foreign' company but one that's not in the same line of business. Chinese Lenovo bought IBM's PC division and seem to be doing quite well.