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Ford Ends Minivan Production
The Daily Auto Insider
Thursday, January 4, 2007
January 2007
Ford confirmed that it will not resume production of its Freestar minivan at its Oakville, Ontario, plant, The Wall Street Journal reported. Ford discontinued the virtually identical Mercury Monterey minivan in August.
Although Ford had previously said it would extend the Freestar through the 2007 model year, it decided instead to concentrate on building the new Ford Edge and Lincoln MKX crossovers, which are also produced in Oakville.
"We suspended production in early November so we could zero in on our production of the Ford Edge and Lincoln MKX," said Anne Marie Gattari, a Ford spokeswoman.
Ford's minivan sales have dropped from more than 250,000 units in 2000 to fewer than 86,000 in 2005. Freestar sales have fallen 35 percent through November, according to Autodata.
Ford is planning to replace its minivan next year with a new full-size crossover based on the Ford Fairlane concept, the story said.
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GM is also thinking about cutting the minivan too. If they do carry one it will only appear under the Chevrolet Uplander name.
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01-05-2007, 07:43 AM
(This post was last modified: 01-06-2007, 05:00 AM by Frost__2001.)
actually GM already killed their minivan production for 2008.
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We thought this might happen at work. It's hard to understand at times the decisions that they make. We have to assume that Ford is now on the hook to their suppliers for the 15,000 orders for parts that are now going unused???
And back in July, we suggested to them to run the Freestar out before starting the Edge to finish production and then concentrate on the new model instead of laying us off or sending us home after 4 hours and paying us for 8.
But fear not. We are still going to be producing a "mini van" type vehicle with the new 7 passenger "Fairlane". I hope they eliminate that name as it does no justice to the original model.
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I think for ford this has been along time coming. Ford has always seemed to be one step behind everyone else when it came to adding new features to their minivan line, it started with the windstar and continued with the freestar.
And I really hope they change the name of their 7 person vehicle, fairlane just doesn't work for a vehicle like that.
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01-05-2007, 07:41 PM
(This post was last modified: 01-05-2007, 07:42 PM by OAC_Sparky.)
habmann,Jan 4 2007, 08:22 PM Wrote:I think for ford this has been along time coming. Ford has always seemed to be one step behind everyone else when it came to adding new features to their minivan line, it started with the windstar and continued with the freestar.
And I really hope they change the name of their 7 person vehicle, fairlane just doesn't work for a vehicle like that.
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Actually, that is only partially true. When the Windstar debuted it was entirely new entirely ahead of its competition, the ONLY competition (Chrysler) by 6 months, while the Caravan was still in its first generation.
That's why we were making around 250,000 of them a year at one every 40 seconds.
What killed the Windstar was twofold. One being failing to keep ahead of the competition, the other being tranny and engine problems (not relating to assembly) and subsequently mishandling the issue when it became apparent.
The Freestar had the opportunity to surge ahead of the competition again, a whole reskin, and a slew of extra features were planned, which in turn were scrapped in light of the money that Ford was losing in the Explorer tire recall. The Freestar was built on an almost completely different chassis, but nobody took notice because externally it appeared the same.
Too little, too late.
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