Ford is ready to retire the T-bird again, according to the Detroit News.
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Ford Division president Steve Lyons said in an interview with the paper that the company plans to stop building the retro-styled Thunderbird convertible after the 2005 or 2006 model year, ending a four-year run.
“We have always planned to build it for four model years, and that’s what we are going to do,” Lyons told the Detroit News. “It would be wrong to keep building it and erode its value. It’s a collectors’ vehicle.”
The newspaper said demand for the Thunderbird was red hot when it was launched in 2001 but has declined significantly. In some cases, the cars are languishing on dealers’ lots for months before they are bought, the Detroit News added, noting that Ford could revive the Thunderbird again in future.
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Special
editions, like this one based on Halle Berry’s James Bond movie car, could not maintain T-bird sales volume |
“We could bring it back,” Lyons told the
paper. “But there is no set timetable. We
will have to have the right design.”
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By GlobalDataThe Detroit News said the end of Thunderbird
production is another ominous sign for Ford’s
Wixom assembly plant in metropolitan Detroit
which is one of the industry’s most underutilised
plants. It also builds the Lincoln LS, which
shares the Jaguar S-type platform, and the
Town Car, basis of many US ‘stretch’ limousines.
The Detroit News said Ford executives have acknowledged that Wixom’s future is under review.
The newspaper noted that dealers could originally ask $10,000 over the $39,000 list price when the Thunderbird arrived in 2001 but demand soon faded and Ford never reached the planned 25,000 sales a year. Last year, Ford sold 19,085 in the United States and, to the end of March, had sold 4,065, down 21% from a year ago, the Detroit News added.
“The demand is nonexistent right now,” Vernon Krause, president of Cherokee Ford in Woodstock, Georgia, told the paper. “It’s such a small niche that it seems like everyone who wanted one got one.”
The Detroit News said Ford tried to stimulate sales through special edition versions of the vehicle, including a coral-colored James Bond edition like the one driven by Halle Berry in the latest 007 movie, “Die Another Day.”
And, last year, Ford launched a series of commercials using footage of the late singer Frank Sinatra bidding farewell to a vintage T-bird, the Detroit News said.
According to the report, the decline in sales can be traced partly to a momentum-sapping production delay last year when Ford engineers were late in delivering an upgraded V-8 engine for the 2003 model Thunderbird and Lincoln LS sedans. Because of the delay, Ford continued to build the 2002 model Thunderbird until the end of November of last year rather than starting to build 2003 versions in August or September as is usual.
The result, the Detroit News said, was a glut of 2002 models on dealer lots, with many still unsold. According to JD Power and Associates, dealers take an average of five months to sell the 2002 Thunderbirds, even though the company is discounting them, the Detroit News said.
“We made a mistake,” Lyons told the newspaper. “If I could do it again, I would have just stopped building the Thunderbird for a month or two. We had people coming to dealerships saying why do I want a year-old Thunderbird.”
Despite the sales drop, Ford still contends the Thunderbird has been a success, the Detroit News noted.
