No Focus. No Fiesta. WTF?

Back in 2018, then-Ford CEO Jim Hackett, who retired in 2020, decided to ax all of Ford's sedans and hatchbacks - including the fuel-efficient Focus and Fiesta - in the U.S. and Canada, and he did not spare the Lincoln brand from his decision.  This means that Ford dealers in North America only offer SUVs, pickup trucks and Mustangs and the Lincoln brand is all SUVs - without a single sport sedan in the lineup.

Since then, the Focus and the Fiesta have been redesigned for the European market.  The Focus remains as edgy as ever, as seen below (in hot ST form).

And the all-new Fiesta (below) is pretty slick too!

Would the Focus and the Fiesta ever come back to the New World?  Yes, said then-and-still-Ford executive chairman William Clay Ford, Jr., provided, of course, that the North American market changed and made compact cars popular again.  An Ford would be readily be able to adapt to such change.

All right.  So, gasoline in the U.S. is $4.76 per gallon.  It's the equivalent of $6.54 in Canada.  All of those SUVs are suddenly to big, too cumbersome too wasteful, and too stupid.  Even the compact ones.  Now is the time for the Focus and the Fiesta to come back to the New World.  So, Ford - what the f**k are you waiting for?

Oh, right, for North American buyers to stop buying these.

*💣💀##!!

Luckless Pedestrians

The latest in an ongoing, interminable series of studies concerning the impact sport utility vehicles and pickup trucks have had on pedestrians says that pedestrians are 59 percent more likely to get hit - most likely fatally - by an SUV or a pickup than a sedan or a hatchback.

Why?  Because they're big muthas, that's why.  Well, that's the short answer.  The long answer is that the A-pillars of these vehicles - the pillars between the windshield and the front doors - are so thick that they create blind spots that make it difficult for the driver to see pedestrians.  They have to be thick, ironically, to keep the passengers of these vehicles safe in the event of a rollover.  The high hoods of these monsters on wheels also make it difficult to the driver to see anyone approaching on foot.

In 2020, the most recent year for which data are available, 6,519 pedestrians were killed in the United States by vehicles despite reduced driving as a result of the COVID pandemic.  It was also in 2020 that SUVs and pickups accounted for over 75 percent of all new vehicles sold in the U.S.

Don't expect SUV sales to be affected anytime soon by this news, because in most America a pedestrian is defined as someone walking to his or her vehicle.   (Do-good liberals who despise SUVs, having lost the battle to prevent their mass proliferation, have shifted their attention elsewhere.)   Rising gas prices won't deter anyone from buying an SUV either.  Besides, there's one thing President Biden can say that would make even Democrats side with the January 6 insurrectionists.  That one thing is, "We need to use less gas, so you should trade your SUVs in for minicars with three-cylinder engines!" 

That's a shame, because I'd really love one of these.

You can certainly see someone coming on foot in this vehicle!  Heck, you'd have to crane your neck up to look a pedestrian in the eye! 

The Michigan Rag

With floods ravaging the central area of Michigan's Lower Peninsula - centered around the Midland, the headquarters of Dow Chemical - Trump has tried to use federal funding to deal with the flood damage, caused mainly by failing dams, to get Governor Gretchen Whitmer to stop distributing applications for mail-in ballots.  He confused the applications with actual ballots, saying that what Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, below, was doing was illegal (it's not) and threatening to withhold funding to help with the Midland disaster if Benson persisted.

Benson fired back, explaining that what she did was perfectly legal and perfectly bipartisan.  "In November of 2018," she told MSNBC's Chris Hayes, "citizens voted overwhelmingly to give themselves this right to vote by mail. It was supported by citizens on both sides of the political spectrum, and it's something citizens on both sides of the political spectrum have done."  Indeed; other states, such was Republican-dominated West Virginia, have pursued voting by mail.  Trump himself votes by mail.  But he is trying to deny voters in Democratic states, and in swing states like Michigan, the opportunity to do so in a presidential election where Trump is behind in the polls but in which Democrats are reluctant to vote in person in the middle of an interminable pandemic.

Trump clearly has Michigan in his sights, as he visited the state this past week and toured a Ford factory making ventilators to respond to the COVID-19 outbreak.  He reportedly did not violate the policy requiring to wear a mask at first, but only wore it briefly.  Later - unmasked - Trump, who has long since bene unmasked for the rotten leader he is, praised the Ford Motor Company for its contributions to American economy and praised company founder Henry Ford for his good bloodlines.  Henry Ford was a vicious anti-Semite who believed there was a Jewish conspiracy aiming to take over America and the world.

So who won this round?  Apparently, Michigan's mostly female Democratic leadership.  This past Thursday, Trump approved Governor Whitmer's request for federal aid to deal with the flooding in Midland this past Thursday despite his threats to cut off aid.  The Federal Emergency Management Association is now authorized to direct all equipment and resources necessary to handle the flooding, with emergency protective measures to be provided at 75 percent federal funding.  And the ballot applications got sent out.

Meanwhile, as Ford continues to make ventilators in the Ypsilanti, Michigan plant that Trump visited, the COVID-19 pandemic has caused two Ford factories - one of which was making Ford F-150 pickup trucks - to temporarily shut down when workers tested positive for the disease.  Sort of appropriate karma for a car company that, while no longer promoting anti-Semitism, now promotes the purchase of gas-guzzling pickups and truck-based monster wagons.

Great Scott!

Here is a production version of the eighth-generation Volkswagen Golf, the world premiere of which is due next Thursday in Wolfsburg.  (The picture was nabbed by a resourceful chap in Slovakia.)  And whether or not the United States gets it in its VW lineup is still up in the air.  That was the message from Volkswagen of America as recently as this past Friday (October 12). 

The decision on that question, as always, rests with one man and one man only - Scott Keogh, Volkswagen of America's president and chief executive officer.  Other VW managers can persuade him one way or the other, but the final call is his alone to make.

Keogh (above) has been CEO of Volkswagen of America for a year now, and it remains to be seen how successful he will ultimately be in his job.  He has tough shoes to fill, given some of the legends among his predecessors, such as Carl Hahn, who built up the Volkswagen brand in North America in the early sixties (and later became chairman of Volkswagen AG, the only former Volkswagen of America president to achieve that position), J. Stuart Perkins, who succeeded Hahn and led Volkswagen to its best years during the era of the Beetle and later oversaw the transition to watercooled VW models, and Bill Young, who saved Volkswagen from oblivion in America with his insistence of better quality control from the factory in Mexico that began supplying cars to the U.S. and Canada in the early nineties.  Keogh has a tall order; he's faced with the task of keeping Volkswagen commercially successful in an era of sport-utility vehicles while having to balance that with the desires of America VW die-hards who prefer the traditional small hatchbacks and sedans that Volkswagen has long offered.

Right now, Keogh is pushing for more SUV models and even a pickup truck in Volkswagen's U.S. lineup, in order to appeal to those buyers (who make up seven out of ten new-vehicle customers), even as he has to decide on the base Golf's future in a market where hatchbacks are spectacularly unpopular but where loyal Volkswagen customers demand such a car because of their own tastes, which are outside the mainstream.  Keogh has talked up SUVs in the motoring press like a disc jockey talks up the latest Ariana Grande record on pop radio, but he's made it clear that hatchbacks won't be cut from the U.S. lineup entirely.  But which hatchbacks will stay?  He has sent signals that only the Golf GTI and Golf R, the Golf's performance variants, will stay in the U.S. market because he still wants to cater to VW "enthusiasts" - suggesting that no one could get enthusiastic or excited over a base Golf hatchback.  (I happen to be a VW  enthusiast who does.)  On the other hand, Keogh has also hinted that the base Mark 8 Golf is assured, despite the fact that it hasn't been confirmed.   

"We will be launching the Golf VIII," Keogh told Automobile magazine in May 2019, "which will be the next-gen and it will have a GTI, so we're 100 percent on board [with that model]. But right now the GTI is going to stay GTI. And the [eighth-generation version of that] will come, and it's going to be as cool as hell."

Koegh has already disappointed many VW enthusiasts in America by canceling the Golf wagon and giving a thumbs-down to the idea of the Golf-sized ID.3 electric hatchback for sale in North America.  (We're getting an electric crossover instead.) While I understand Keogh's desire to sell the more popular car styles to keep Volkswagen in business in America, I hope he remembers the loyalists - those of us who still bought VWs when consumer magazines told us not to, bought them during the depths of VW's misfortune in the early nineties, and stood by the brand even after the diesel scandal broke.  I hope he recognizes, as I told him in three separate letters (full disclosure), that the Golf embodies Volkswagen in the watercooled age and that the base car should remain in the U.S. lineup, with only enough cars for those who want it.  So maybe I should be happy that Keogh is trying to add a pickup truck to Volkswagen s North American lineup; a vehicle like that would certainly offset losses on every base Golf VW sells to loyal American customers who want the same car their German (and Canadian) counterparts get to buy.

My gut instinct is that Koegh would rather not take the base Golf out of the U.S. market, but he is aware of how poorly they sell not just against SUVs and sedans, but maybe even other hatchbacks, and his decision will ultimately be made based on the numbers.  If he can't justify keeping the base Golf in America, he'll drop it.  If he can find a way to include it in the U.S. lineup going forward, he'll keep it. 

That said, I leave you with this.  Scott Keogh says he wants to make Volkswagen matter in the U.S. again, though it's always mattered to the VW loyalists here.  So, a lot of us will be watching every move he makes with baited breath.  Especially his next one.    

Hamburgers and Pickups

The speakers at this year's Conservative Political Action Conference, including Donald Trump, took a lot of cheap but effective shots at the Democratic Party, especially the Green New Deal, the individual components of which are actually quite popular but the totality of which is political suicide thanks to the idiotic way it was rolled out.  One speaker framed quite clearly the issue for Americans who may have trouble with the Green New Deal because of its call for regulations on cattle ranching and its call for more fuel-efficient cars.  The Democrats, he said, are trying to take way your hamburgers and pickup trucks.

This claim is as asinine as the Green New Deal's botched roll-out, but, simplified for a mass audience, it has resonance.  No food could be more American than the hamburger (even though it originated in Germany), and no car is more American than the pickup truck, a manly vehicle meant to haul big stuff in a country where everything big matters.  Ford's recent commercial showing a parade of past and current Ford pickups hauling everything imaginable, including, tellingly, a trailer carrying a Bob's Big Boy sign, to the sound of Jerry Reed's 1977 country-and-western classic "East Bound and Down", sums up America better than any rap video from Donald Glover can. 

The Democrats need a rejoinder to Republican scare tactics aimed at the Green New Deal.  The Green New Deal may advocate policies to make beef production more environmentally sustainable but no one is being asked to give up beef, be it hamburgers or sirloin steaks.  And there'll still be pickups for people who need them, and a lot of folks out in the American heartland do need them, as well as carpenters and handymen in the big metropolitan areas on the coasts.  But the Green New Deal recognizes that most urban and suburban car buyers don't need a large truck, and, based on the fact that buying habits and living patterns are affected by government policy, seeks to encourage Americans who'd be better off with something more sensible than a Silverado or an F-150 to buy a smaller car or take more mass transit.

The only problem is, you can't put that explanation on bumper sticker.

As for me, I mostly eat hamburgers made out of poultry meat, and I don't need to tell you again that my car is a Volkswagen Golf - as European as a Ford F-150 is American - so I can adapt to a more environmentally friendly economic policy easily.  But I'm not like most Americans - something I've been reminded of in no uncertain terms - and if the Democrats have any shot of regaining the White House, they have to sell the Green New Deal to its skeptics rather than preach to the converted.  Too bad that is not going to happen.  While the Republicans have a perfectly succinct argument against it - "They're going to take away your hamburgers and pickups!" - the Democrats won't be able to come up with anything nearly as catchy.  Maybe that's because they screwed up the introduction of the Green New Deal so thoroughly, from its cow-fart references to suggestions of an undersea rail line to Hawaii (all graphite and glitter, apparently) to supporting people who don't want to work to the very fact that much of this was first-draft stuff that never should have gotten out, that they're stuck with defending the indefensible.  I'm sure that the Green New Deal's backers think that, with time and tact, they can make their plan in its totality popular with American voters.  Of course, they are flat-out dead wrong.  Because what's true of new vehicles is also true of policy proposals - you only get one chance to launch.   

And the launch of the all-new Chevrolet Silverado (above) has been pretty impressive!

So, Democrats, are you going to prove me wrong and sell the Green New Deal effectively?  Are you gonna do what I say can't be done? 'Cause you've got a long way to go and a short time to get there.