New Ford Australia President & CEO

[jpd80]

Originally Posted by Crazy Dazz

I will never understand Ford's attitude towards the Power-Shart.
It was a questionable concept to begin with, certainly something that she have been treated with a lot of scepticism and caution. When it was proven to not work, they should have dumped the concept then and there. Reprogrammed them all as "Clutchless Manuals", and simply stopped selling automatics whilst they rushed obsolete slushboxes back into production.
I can, to a point, comprehend the corporate mentality of defending the crap they had already sold, but what astonishes me is that they kept on flogging them.
I know the institutional mentality is bringing a replacement into production takes years, but surely there were alternatives? Revert to a previous design, or just buy your trannies from Mazda or Volvo.

And then, when they finally bring the new models to market, instead of trying to recoup lost ground, or even re-establish the reputation by filling the market, they took an attitude of "our cars are too good for you peasants" and tried to market them as a premium product.

Right at the very start, putting a 2.0 engine in front of that dry clutch manual was problematic
and that was revealed during development when engineers couldn't get the slip angle to work.

Yes, Ford's biggest fail with PowerShift was not admitting defeat and moving to the 6F auto earlier,
the Americans also passed on the 2015 update to 1.5 EB/ 6F auto, they kept selling PowerShift
in the focus for another four years when the ROW already had the solution.

But the really disgusting thing for many was how badly Ford treated their affected customers,
that Ford had to be forced by court action to do the right thing was a real low point in basic trust.