STABILITY CONTROL AT "AMERICA'S CAR COMPANY"

Stability control for the "Way Forward" is big news at Ford Motor Company (R).

The most obvious kind is FoMoCo's flirtation with Electronic Stability Control (ESC) for its vehicles. www.paddocktalk.com reports that FoMoCo will add electronic stability control to all its domestic-branded vehicles by 2009. ttp://www.paddocktalk.com/news/html/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=41216

ESC uses gyroscopic sensors to measureyaw and roll movements, and then intervene electronically in vehicle control. FoMoCo claims ESC "offers additional confidence to drivers in emergency situations by helping them stay on the road and avoid accidents."

“This is an acceleration of our plans to standardize safety features and is in line with our goal to be America’s car company,” acording to FoMoCo group vice president, Product Development, The Americas, Derrick Kuzak. He also said that making ESC standard is motivated by “That commitment and an intense customer focus at the heart of the Way Forward plan . . . ."

Of course, it may also be motivated by FoMoCo's desire not to be the American Trial Lawyers's favorite car company. FoMoCo has paid dearly at the hands of these Lexus, BMW, Mercedes and Bentley-driving legal pirates, who gamble huge sums in contingency fee cases in the hope of hitting a monster payoff as the purported "remedy" for some product liability fault in Ford-built vehicles. These lawyers, and their cadre of paid experts, often claim FoMoCo's failure to take simple, technologically-feasible "remedial" measures, such as ESC, could have foreseeably prevented their clients's traffic accidents. Many times, they indignantly waive a "smoking gun" memorandum before spellbound juries, containing the thoughts of some subordinate FoMoCo engineer on the practicality of some new "fix" for a safety concern. These lawyers also manage to misdirect the juries away from any driver culpabilty in the crashes at issue, placing all the blame squarely on FoMoCo.

So cynically, the ESC decision may be more about "stablilty control" of future products liability litigation than it is about some wishful thinking about being "America's car company."

Erin Mays at Autoblog opines that FoMoCo's move is simply in anticipation of federal action to require some sort of "stability control" in all light vehicles. http://www.autoblog.com/2006/09/13/ford-plans-on-making-stability-control-standard-on-all-models/ In the context of environmental handwringing and proposed increases in government regulation of safety and emissions concerns, to some this undoubtedly seems like a reprise of the prelude to the 1970s--the most disasterous decade in American automobile history since the Great Depression!

Meanwhile, the Automotive News is reporting that Toyota Motor Corporation's vice president of external affairs, Irv Miller is predicting the that Toyota's current 11 percent increase in car sales and 8.5 percent increase in truck sales will not be sustained in 2007. www.autonews.com Miller sees only a 3 to 5 percent sales increase nextyear. Miller said, "I don't believe that anyone in our organization believes it's going to be in the 10 to 12 percent range that it has been in the last couple of years."

All of this lowering of expectations comes in the context of Toyota's high profile move into NASCAR Nextel Cup competition, the opening of Toyota's new Texas truck plant (visited by FoMoCo in Episode 11 at www.fordboldmoves.com), a new Tundra pickup, no sign of abatement in demand for the new Camry, and a full line of trendy hybrids in Toyota's Lexus brand.

While some may conclude that Toyota's low-ball prognostication is simply from jitters about the recent decline in U.S. gasoline prices -- which when moving higher likely "pulled forward" some of the market shift to Toyota brands -- the cynic figures that such faux modesty is nothing more than a smokescreen to obscure Toyota's juggernaut pass General Motors as the world's largest car company next year. So much for aspiring to be just "America's car company."

Back at FoMoCo, the board is meeting today to begin consideration of the latest corporate "stability control" plan. According to the Automotive News and the Wall Street Journal, the latest cost-cutting scheme seeks to "lower white-collar costs by 30 percent" and will also "include cutting jobs and benefits." The newspapers report that the FoMoCo board will also look at "a new pricing strategy designed to narrow the gap between sticker prices and transaction prices in vehicle sales."

Presumably this latest plan is the byproduct of the pre-Alan Mulally era, although Mulally's cost-cutting expertise may be evident in the fine-tuning.

Shrinking FoMoCo's non-union workforce and "transaction pricing" are simply low-hanging fruit for the budget cutters. Abstractly, both look like good "stability control" moves to stop the River Rouge of ink flooding the corporate ledgers.

And slashing the white-collar work force undoubtedly will prune some dead wood. It may even reduce the number of "smoking gun" memos that so electrify FoMoCo's many trial lawyer parasites.

The real question, however, is whether these cuts will provide real, long-term "stability control" by facilitating reductions in bureaucracy and increasing empowerment of FoMoCo's few visionaries who truly understand the product mix, performance, quality, features and pricing essential to any real "Way Forward." Or will these dispiriting moves trigger essential, productive and creative workers to abandon FoMoCo. If so, these budget cuts will further destabilize FoMoCo.

The goal of a leaner management corps is just the latest twist in controlling the FoMoCo behemoth. Henry Ford privatized the company during the Model T's dominant run as a means of solidifying his control. Then he created a chaotic, disfunctional organization that depended on him and declined almost in lockstep with his increased personal frailty.

When Bill Ford's grandfather, Henry Ford II, took the nearly bankrupt mess over, he believed "stability control" meant copying the complicated, hierarchal GM managment system. Thus began the development of the massive FoMoCo bureaucracy.

In the October 2006 issue of Mustangs and Fords magazine, a writer comments that FoMoCo operates like a huge train: it takes a long, long time to get it moving and it takes even longer to get it to stop.

The balance that FoMoCo must find is between the chaos of Henry Ford's FoMoCo and the stultifying bureaucratic inertia of Henry II's FoMoCo.

And just as ESC doesn't really know the difference between an intentional, fun, controlled maunuver and a potential disaster, FoMoCo's "stability control" budget axe may not discriminate between the good and the bad.

And don't expect all this economizing to pay dividends for low profile niches, such as SVT, FRPP and Ford Racing. These underappreciated and misunderstood "fun" programs probably seem like luxuries to those focused only on short-terms stock price boosting and feel-good pabulum like "Driving American innovation" and "America's car company."

It's curious that FoMoCo aspires to being "America's car company" by slashing American jobs while repackaging Swedish and Japanese designs, the most popular of which are assembled in Mexico. That's a strange vision for winning over "America" indeed.