Ford (F) Looks For “World Car” Holy Grail
Major auto companies have made efforts to create a “world car” for decades. It would be a vehicle which could use one design, one platform, and one engine which could be sold in Asia, Europe, North America, and South America…
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A successful “world car” would save billions of design and production charges. A single vehicle for a large number of markets would decrease parts sources and increase economies of scale.
Ford’s (NYSE:F) new Focus, which the company says will use 80% of the same components from market to market will carry a 2-liter, four-cylinder engine which will get unusually high gas mileage.
Ford’s risk in building the car in multiple markets is that the markets have multiple tastes. One hurdle that the “world car” efforts has always faced is that what buyers in the US want may be very different from what they want in Italy, Germany, or India.
Fuel efficiency may also be overrated although that seems impossible today. Gas prices are relatively high around the world. but fossil fuel supply and demand have been cyclical over the last several decades and gas prices may come down again. Many car buyers still like the rumble and performance of a big engine.
Douglas A. McIntyre
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Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.
McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.
His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.
A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.
TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.
McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.
