Manufacturing Quality

"Dave Stadt" wrote

I bought a new F150 some years ago. Biggest piece of poorly assembled,
unreliable piece of crap I ever owned.

Yep. The thing is, F-150 owners aren't smart enough to realize that pickup
trucks are NOT supposed to be pieces of crap! g

I've worked on both. Although GM occasionally likes to stick things in
hard-to-get-at places, Ford likes to do **** poor engineering.

JMHO, mind you! ;-)
--
Jim in NC

"Morgans" wrote in message ...
:
: "Dave Stadt" wrote
:
: I bought a new F150 some years ago. Biggest piece of poorly assembled,
: unreliable piece of crap I ever owned.
:
: Yep. The thing is, F-150 owners aren't smart enough to realize that pickup
: trucks are NOT supposed to be pieces of crap! g
:
: I've worked on both. Although GM occasionally likes to stick things in
: hard-to-get-at places, Ford likes to do **** poor engineering.
:
: JMHO, mind you! ;-)
: --
: Jim in NC
:

And how may of them don't turn in to rust in 10 years. When I see an old rust bucket rolling down the road, odds are it
is a Ford. I think they finally figured out how to do better metal prep about 5 years ago, but we'll see....

Newps wrote:


Matt Whiting wrote:

Newps wrote:



Jonathan Goodish wrote:


(though I think Ford has figured out how to build a quality truck)




Think? The F150 has been the best selling truck in this country for
the last 30 years running.



And Microsoft is the best selling OS. What has that to do with quality?


Everything when there is competition. You don't buy Windows, you buy a
computer that has Windows.

Almost everyone who uses or tests computers reports that Apple computers
are of higher quality than IBM architecture PCs. There is competition,
and quality wasn't the dominant factor as it often isn't.

Matt

Newps wrote:



Matt Whiting wrote:

Newps wrote:

That's because Ford doesn't force everybody to buy a truck that rides
worse because one twentieth of one percent of the trucks will have a
snowplow hung on the front. If you want the snowplow package you
order it.



I thought you were the one who didn't like the "girlie man" trucks.


I don't. I own an F250, the 150 won't tow my 5th wheel at freeway
speeds plus it is too small.


That

is what a standard F-150 is. Then again, 95% of truck buyers don't
use then as a truck. Which means that Toyota, Nissan and Honda will
likely do very well longer-term with their car-like trucks.


We'll see. They haven't so far these last 30 years.

They haven't had any thing close to a full-size truck until fairly recently.

Matt

Jonathan Goodish wrote:

In article ,
Matt Whiting wrote:

Even the standard F-150 is now pretty wimpy. When I called to inquire
about a snowplow for my K1500 a few years ago, the first question they
asked me when I asked for a price was if I had an F-150. The reason is



The "standard" F150 may be pretty wimpy, but it's roughly equivalent in
capability to the "premium" Japanese offerings. If you want to tow, you
buy the appropriate package, which includes more than a trailer hitch.
If you want a snow plow on the front, you buy the appropriate package.

Yes, and the appropriate package is a base Chevy or Dodge. :-)

Matt

Jonathan Goodish wrote:

In article ,
Matt Whiting wrote:

I thought you were the one who didn't like the "girlie man" trucks.
That is what a standard F-150 is. Then again, 95% of truck buyers don't
use then as a truck. Which means that Toyota, Nissan and Honda will
likely do very well longer-term with their car-like trucks.


Well, in 2005 Ford sold almost 10 times as many F-series trucks as the
closet Japanese competitor (Toyota). If 95% of truck buyers don't "use
it as a truck," there's still something that those buyers like better
about a Ford truck.

Its called the lemming affect. It took a while to fade in the car
market, but now it is almost gone, other than Toyota seems to be
developing it quite well for its cars. Trucks will follow, unfortunately.

Matt

Judah wrote:

Newps wrote in
:


Matt Whiting wrote:


And Microsoft is the best selling OS. What has that to do with quality?

Everything when there is competition. You don't buy Windows, you buy a
computer that has Windows.



Actually, several companies, including Dell and IBM, tried to market PCs with
Linux on them instead of Windows. OS/2 failed, not for quality. Even Apple
had to give in to the MS OS wars, with their new ads that indicate their new
Macs run Windows...

Microsoft has competition. They're just better marketers.

Which was my point exactly. Newps doesn't understand that quality and
sales volume are often not correlated.

Matt

In article ,
Matt Whiting wrote:
Well, in 2005 Ford sold almost 10 times as many F-series trucks as the
closet Japanese competitor (Toyota). If 95% of truck buyers don't "use
it as a truck," there's still something that those buyers like better
about a Ford truck.

Its called the lemming affect. It took a while to fade in the car
market, but now it is almost gone, other than Toyota seems to be
developing it quite well for its cars. Trucks will follow, unfortunately.


The Ford F-150 has been the best selling truck for 30 years straight.
It has been the best selling VEHICLE in the United States for quite a
number of consecutive years. That isn't because of a "lemming effect,"
though I know quite a few Honda and Toyota owners who are definitely
lemmings.

Ford would have to fall pretty hard for a pretty long time in order for
the Japanese to catch up. Ford's fall would have to be combined with a
broader and more capable line of Japanese trucks (i.e. heavy duty). So
far, the Japanese haven't been willing to make a truly heavy duty truck
for the mass market.

In 2005, Ford sold just shy of 1 million F-series trucks. The closest
Japanese competitor--Toyota--sold around 125,000 trucks. That's a huge
gap, and in the middle was Dodge with around 450,000 and GM, with
somewhere around 800,000, I believe. The Ford/GM dominance of the truck
market likely makes the costs to gain market share prohibitive for the
Japanese competitors.

One thing that neither Ford nor GM have is a decent small or mid-sized
truck. Toyota and Nissan both have decent mid-sized offerings in the
redesigned Tacoma and Frontier. Dodge had a great truck in the Dakota
until the redesign (I think it was 2005) that basically ruined it, in my
opinion.




JKG

Newps,

We want big and powerful.


Until the fuel prices climb some more...

--
Thomas Borchert (EDDH)

In article ,
Judah wrote:
Actually, several companies, including Dell and IBM, tried to market PCs with

Linux on them instead of Windows. OS/2 failed, not for quality. Even Apple
had to give in to the MS OS wars, with their new ads that indicate their new
Macs run Windows...

Microsoft has competition. They're just better marketers.

Not really. When's the last time you saw a Windows ad? The reality is
that Microsoft is basically a monopoly--whether you might consider it to
be de facto or government-sanctioned. When governments and companies
mandate a Windows-only standard, that effectively shuts out all other
competition. When folks buy home PCs, they buy what's being used at
work.

Even back in the days before Windows, when PCs ran MS-DOS, Apple was
being displaced in the home as more companies issued PCs to the grunt
workforce, despite the fact that Apple's machines were still heavily
used in education.

Apple knows that they have a much better mouse trap with Mac OS X.
Their retail stores are their best marketing effort yet, and they've
been producing positive results in market share. Apple is in no way
"giving in" to Microsoft by advertising that Macs can run Windows; just
the opposite, they are using that advantage as a marketing tool to
remove the "risk" out of investing in a Mac. If you buy a Mac and don't
like OS X, you can still run Windows. Apple is betting that not many
Macs will be running Windows as their primary operating system, and I
suspect they are right.



JKG