"People keep asking me 'hey Tom- why Ford? Why Now?"
Who are these "people?" Why do they keep bothering this guy? If Tom wasn't actually a pitchman for Ford, I guess a proper answer would be "you think I have nothing better to do than to give you an education on car-buying? Who asked you to buy a Ford? Leave me alone!"
But since Tom IS a bought-and-paid for whore for the Ford Motor Company, we are supposed to believe that he explained to these "people" how the New Ford is not your Dad's Ford- it's not a pile of junk which is inferior in every way to it's Japanese counterpart.
Well, that's not very interesting. So let's imagine how the conversation would have gone if Tom decided to be as honest and to-the-point as humanly possible:
"Hey Tom, why Ford?"
"Because that's the company that's currently paying me to pitch their crappy product."
"Why Now?"
"Because if people buy Fords right now, the company will continue to pay me to pitch their crappy product."
So easy, I'd feel guilty for being paid for running this site- if only I were being paid for running this site.
I remember what my dad used to say about Ford; he made a joke about the word Ford being an acronym for the phrase "Found on road dead." I've seen nothing in the six years since he died to contradict that so having some jerk shill for Detroit doesn't impress me either. At least they don't have the Chairman of the Board trying to ram their crappy product down our throats.
ReplyDeleteOne problem that Ford has is that it thinks that if it wraps itself in the American flag it can guilt us into buying their garbage. Heck, its cheaper than actually making it worth buying, right?
ReplyDeleteIt amazes me that the idiots in Detroit didn't learn a damned thing from the seventies; you'd think they'd have noticed that the Japanese were eating into their market share because they made better cars cheaper and resolved to beat them at their own game. Instead, they rolled out a vehicle best thought of as a gated community on wheels: the SUV, a machine created for the sole purpose of allowing plush-bottomed women to bomb down the road like the Juggernaut of Vishnu without having to interact the world around them.
ReplyDeleteDetroit claims to produce "cars America wants." Actually, they are really good at feeding irrational impulses- Minivans were pretty popular, and so were Jeeps and trucks, so let's create a Van-Truck Hybrid for suburban soccer moms. Let's keep building them as the price of gas skyrockets, because "its what Americans want." Let's end up with parking lots filled with these things when the bubble bursts and gas hits $4 per gallon. Now, let's play catch-up with the foreign car companies that built practical, good-looking cars and did a great job selling the public on why they should want to buy them.
ReplyDeleteIn short, American car companies are like the junk food of the auto industry- "this tastes good. It's not good for you, but it tastes good- so we are going to dish it out to you for the next ten years. Let the other losers experiment with smart designs that you might not like right away. We'll just snigger at them. And if all else fails, we'll wave the flag and accuse you of being unpatriotic when you tire of our junk food."
The pathetic thing is that this has, as the Cylons say, all happened before and will all happen again; I remember reading a book from the late fifties that discussed Detroit's fear of a V-Dub planet and Ford's consternation that the Edsel was a colossal failure. How odd that no matter what the crisis, be it the light of the Red's rocket glare or the end of cheap oil, those goons still won't wake up and see what the public needs.
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