[ZTWsquared]

P-51 ... I know you're just giving examples ... but the key thing here is for Ford to interpret these factors correctly for Canada ... and per your examples, IMO they haven't ... ie:

P-51,Nov 25 2005, 05: Wrote:

Quote:My question How does market trends, customer demands, engineering advances, and dealership input cause the deletion of heater ducts?

Market Trends: Small cars are cheap econoboxes.

In Canada the Focus is considered neither small nor cheap ... in the U.S. maybe ... and in any event, the market trend in Canada is towards adding content to econoboxes. Think about it ... the marketing for every small car that has rear seat heat ducts, is sure to include that fact. If it wasn't meaningful, they wouldn't bother. No one advertises the fact that their vehicles have spare tires.

Quote:Engineering Advances: They realized they could just not install the ducts and save $0.05 per vehicle.

Hardly an advance in engineering unless they figured the console itself could move the hot air into the rear seat area (and per their own admission they didn't even think about it) ... more like an advance in aggressive cost cutting.

Quote:Dealership Input: They communicated that many people didn't even notice the ducts exist.

On that basis, there's no way any Focus should have air bags. I know a lot of Ford dealers from my work with them ... and here's one thing I know -- they don't have the interest or the means to assess meaningful consumer input unless it is delivered in the form of a complaint ... so if you consider that the 2000, 2001, 2002, and 2003 Focus all had rear seat heat ducts ... there'd be absolutely no way dealer input could be a factor in a decision to remove them for 2004.

You hit the nail on the head in a previous post ... someone in manufacturing (probably some American from the south) made an arbitrary decison to remove them based solely on the need to reduce cost ... and then they forgot to tell anyone in sales or marketing.

The cross rails on the roofrack is another example that's already been noted ... another that might be related to the thread about "noise from the rear of the wagon" is the removal of the rear passenger side composite/fibre thingy (baffle?) in the rear wheelwell. My dealer pointed that one out to me. The only reason we could figure they didn't remove the driver's side one, is because of the exhaust being there.

To me, this is the hallmark of a desperate and disfunctional company ... and begs the question: what else have they deleted that hasn't been noticed? Having read every Dealer news bulletin between November 13, 2003 and April 29, 2005 ... I can tell you the list that they did publish is pretty long. And by the way, no mention of the removal of rear seat heat ducts in that 17 month period.

Sorry for the long post ... this thing has me p!ssed off again.