Ford Aims to focus on smaller cars with bigger quality

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Ford Aims to focus on smaller cars with bigger quality

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Ford Aims to focus on smaller cars with bigger quality - 9/11/2008 7:51:41 AM

Patrick

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US domestic automakers, which have generally relied on the sale of large engines and large vehicles, are faced with slumping sales due to increased fuel prices and concerns of more gas price hikes in the near future. Many foreign auto companies, such as Toyota and Nissan, who have been focusing a great deal of their research and development in very small and very fuel efficient models have taken a fair portion of the US market, but Ford Motor Company plans to fight back hard in the 2010 model year.

Like the currently more successful Toyota, Ford has been offering smaller, more “Euro-friendly” models outside of the US market such as the Ford Ka, and Ford has vowed to offer those small vehicles in the US by 2010. Those models that we can expect to hit the US market are the Ford Fiesta, which was a subcompact in the US in the 80s and 90) and Ford Focus, which will receive a significant facelift before then. However, Ford plans to address the most common issue connected to these low cost subcompacts, and that is quality control. Many of the lower priced vehicles in the US market are often associated with low quality, so FMC plans to send a group of quality control experts to Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, to become “Six Sigma Black Belts”. These highly trained quality control gurus will then spend time working in the new assembly plants to help greatly reduce the number of problems with new vehicles.

Ford hopes to see the interest in these small vehicles flourish due to their similarities to the popular sub-compacts available in the US now, but with the added attention to details these vehicles should be considered a more viable alternative to the Japanese built counterparts, which have typically carried the claim of being more reliable. American cars have closed the perceived quality gap between them and foreign competition, and this new Six Sigma Black Belt program could help FMC move to the next level in the sub-compact market, as they have promised to be not only as reliable as the current opponents, but rather they intend to be considered among the most reliable cars in the market.

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