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Ford Apparently Doesn’t Care About Engines Anymore
We have bad news for Ford fans: a top executive just said the automaker doesn’t care about engines anymore. His justification is that consumers don’t care about themeither. And boy, do people have a lot of hot takes about this.
Ford came out with the cringiest marketing campaign recently.
Speaking at a recent Bernstein conference, Ford Vice Chair John Lawler shared his controversial thoughts.
“I don’t think that consumers really think about powertrains the way they did 30 years ago. Where combustion engines defined what a vehicle was; the horsepower, the displacement, the torque, and everything about the vehicle; I think a lot of that is gone.”
As Ford and other Western automakers face the looming threat of Chinese brands which sell vehicles at unbelievably low prices, the Blue Oval and others are looking for every competitive advantage possible.
That includes outsourcing engine development and manufacturing to suppliers. In other words, your Ford might have the exact same engine as a Honda or Chevy or Kia. Lawler believes car shoppers won’t care.
Unfortunately, we think for a portion of the market this is true. For some people, all they care about is when they push the ignition button the car turns on and it goes. They don’t know or care about how many cylinders it has, the displacement, or how much power it makes.
But there’s always been a subset of society that has this kind of attitude. Suddenly, Lawler and others in the industry believe they should cater to thembut really it’s a pretense.
The real reason isn’t because there are consumers who don’t care about engines. What it comes down to is automakers are scared spitless they’re going to get mowed over by Chinese automakers. Instead of leaning into what they do best and riding out the storm, they’re going to try beating the Chinese at their game. It’s a dumb move.
The thing is your average person who buys a Nissan Rogue or some other beige vehicle doesn’t care about the engine, until they do. If the thing is sluggish because it doesn’t make much power and they have trouble merging onto the highway, they care. If the engine blows up at 80,000 miles because it was engineered or manufactured poorly, they care.
They might not obsess over engine specs like enthusiasts, but there’s a reason why Toyota sells so many Camrys: everyone knows they’re super reliable and that’s largely because of the proprietary engine design. Take that away and what is the Camry?
It’s revealing how the automotive media is largely agreeing with Lawler, even if begrudgingly because they’ve all bought into the narrative that electric cars are inevitably the future. That’s the other thing driving this move. Automakers want to justify killing off internal combustion engines and taking away resources to further develop them is a wonderful way to do that.
But Ford and others can’t just turn away from ICE engines. They have to turn public opinion against them, salting the earth for Toyota or anyone else who might try to keep innovating in that space. They want to force the industry into electrification now that EV mandates won’t be happening.
We hope they fail and miserably so. Long live ICE.
Source: Automotive News
Image via Ford
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