Fifteen Eighty Four

Is anyone else floored by this?

At Ford, End of a Big-Vehicle Era Takes a Toll (NY Times)

Ford and GM are losing lots of money and generally making a mess of things, because they focused so much on pickup trucks and SUVs, which are both fairly worthless right now.

And all along, their foreign competitors, (even Ford in Europe!) produced small cars and flourished. How could they not know that the day was coming?

“These write-downs are another result of the tremendous movement in the marketplace away from trucks and S.U.V.’s,” Ford’s chief executive, Alan R. Mulally, said in an interview.

This isn’t new. It looks like they’ll have to take a pretty big beating before they’ll get up and innovate something.