Gojirra99

2006 Ford GT "Heritage" Limited Edition


Dearborn MI February 6, 2006; Bloomberg News reported that Ford Motor Co. will end production of the $150,000 GT sports car this year and scrap plans for a high- performance sport-utility vehicle to cut costs and reduce losses in North America.

Ford, the second-largest U.S. automaker, sold just 1,032 of the GTs last year after starting production in 2003 as part of its centennial celebration. The Dearborn, Michigan-based company is also canceling the Explorer Sport Trac Adrenalin, a 390-horsepower SUV, spokesman Jon Harmon said.

“They couldn’t make money on volume like that,” said David Healy, a Burnham Securities Inc. analyst in Sierra Vista, Arizona. “It was a loss leader.”

Chief Executive Officer William Clay Ford Jr. approved production of the GT in 2002, a month after he announced his first restructuring plan for the company. The GT was part of Ford Motor’s attempt at an image makeover, which also included television advertisements featuring the CEO. The automaker began running a new series of Bill Ford advertisements last year, emphasizing a commitment to making more fuel-efficient vehicles.

“We always said it was a twomodel-year run” for the GT, Harmon said. The sports car is produced at a Wixom, Michigan, plant that will be closed in 2007 as part of Bill Ford’s second restructuring plan, announced last week.

The GT was based on the GT40 car that Ford raced in the 1960s at the 24-hour endurance competition at Le Mans, France. The Ford car won the annual event from 1966 through 1969.

Ford showed a prototype of the new GT at the 2002 North American International Auto Show in Detroit. Bill Ford ordered the first production GT.

“It was meant to be a limitedproduction car and it had run its course,” said auto analyst Erich Merkle at consulting firm IRN Inc. in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

“It was one of those vehicles that look good in the ads.”

The Detroit News, which reported the end of GT production earlier today, said that employees at Wixom were told work on the GT would end in September.

The Wixom plant currently makes the GT and the Lincoln LS and Town Car sedans. The company plans to end production of the LS this year. Wixom stopped production of the Thunderbird car last year.

The factory’s closing is part of Ford’s plan to cut as many as 30,000 jobs in North America.

The company had a pretax loss of $1.6 billion in North America in 2005 and has lost U.S. market share every year since 1995.

The Sport Trac Adrenalin was shown last year at the New York auto show as a prototype, and Ford said it planned to produce the SUV next year. Sales of standard Explorer SUVs fell 29 percent in 2005.

source : theautochannel

rominl

iTrader: (4)

uh oh, very sad. and i guess that really spells how much trouble they are in.... just 1000 units since 03, and i wonder if all the owners knew about the hedious gas mileage before they got their car

i just hope they could shrink to a point where they could become profitable again, without being too ridiculous

GFerg

I love this car. One more year would be cool, but with only a thousand or so copies, this will make a nice collectors item.

Falcon LS

I sometimes question what people who run/manage Ford are thinking. They're always after fast money and I beleive that is what brought them to where they are today.

Overclocker

DEARBORN, Mich. — The Ford GT supercar, Lincoln LS and the high-performance Adrenalin edition of the 2007 Explorer Sport will be eliminated from the Ford product lineup this year.

All three are victims of the Dearborn automaker's move to idle factories as a cost-cutting measure.

Ford spokesman Jim Cain told Inside Line that production of the LS will be stopped on April 13 and production of the GT will be halted at an as-yet-undetermined date later this year. He said the demise of the GT was merely "coincidental" with the closure of the plant responsible for final assembly of the supercar.

"It was intended to cover two model years," Cain said.

The 500-horsepower GT, which is priced at about $150,000, was launched on a limited-volume basis as an updated GT40 in 2004. Ford sold approximately 1,300 GTs in 2005. The LS and the GT are assembled at Ford's Wixom, Michigan factory, which is slated to close in spring 2007.

The upcoming 2007 Shelby GT500 Mustang, which goes on sale this summer priced in the low $40,000s, will replace the GT as Ford's high-performance image vehicle. Cain said the rights to buy the first GT500 were sold for $600,000 in late January during the Barrett-Jackson auction, giving the automaker a strong sense of the market potential for the most powerful production Mustang ever made. He would not disclose volume projections for the GT500.

The No. 2 U.S. automaker had planned to release a high-performance, SVT-tuned edition of the '07 Sport Trac, based on a concept version that had been unveiled at the 2005 New York Auto Show. But the company decided the vehicle had a limited potential market and has eliminated it from the lineup.

Cain said the Lincoln MKS, which was shown in concept form in January at the Detroit auto show and is expected to reach production in 2008, is not intended to be a replacement for the slow-selling LS. "The S is a teaser," he said. "It's larger and front-drive or all-wheel drive, and the LS is smaller and rear-drive. We're working on a new full-size Lincoln sedan. We're in the process of deciding which segments we want to be in or don't want to be in. We haven't signaled a replacement for the LS yet."

Both the MKS and a larger Lincoln sedan will be based on a version of the same Volvo-derived chassis that underpins the Ford Five Hundred sedan.

What this means to you: Ford is putting its money and effort into higher-volume, sure-bet products, such as the upcoming Shelby GT500 Mustang, as it scrambles to regain its financial foothold in North America.

Source: http://www.edmunds.com/insideline/do...cleId=109191#2