Thread regarding Ford layoffs

We're no longer owners of the biggest flop in automotive history

A new piece from Bloomberg makes the case, comparing the Tesla vehicle to the misfortunes of Ford's Edsel, which was first introduced in 1957 and discontinued just two years later. After spending years building up hype for the car, Ford predicted selling 200,000 units in its first year, but ended up selling less than a third of that.

That's comparable to expectations versus reality of the Cybertruck. In fact, the Cybertruck is actually doing worse in key ways. Tesla's annual sales target was 250,000 units, but it didn't even crack 40,000 sales in its first year. And like the Edsel, it's sold less with each successive year, with barely 7,100 registered in the US in 2026 so far, according to S&P Global Mobility data — despite Musk juicing those figures by selling Cybertrucks to his own companies.

https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/looking-cybertruck-biggest-flop-automotive-145559135.html


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Post ID: @OP+1kyaw1jgh

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The Edsel was a product of the Wh-z Kids led by Robert McNamara who replaced common sense with mathematical logic and seat of the pants engineers with Ivy League smarties at Ford. Surveys were taken before the car was designed asking questions such as “do you prefer vertical or horizontal fins?”, “do you prefer large fins or small fins?” Today this is a business school case study in marketing myopicism, the Wh-z Kids didn’t anticipate that customers didn’t want fins at all. Robert McNamara and his Ivy League trained wh-z kids left Ford and went to the US Department of Defense where they continued to ply their mathematical wisdom. They proved that the Vietnam War would be easy to win, and this became policy under JFK’s presidency. A few years later McNamara hired a small team of historians to figure out what went wrong… They wrote a document that became known as the Pentagon Papers. The Best and the Brightest and The Reckoning both by David Halberstam were published. In 1996, twenty years after the end of the Vietnam War, former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara published his controversial memoir In “Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam” which reveals that he still hadn’t figured out what went wrong with his approach.

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Post ID: @g2+1kyaw1jgh

@OP

Not so fast. Both trucks were pretty good. If you ever driven either you'd not be able to deny the tech and the novelty of driving one.

Can both companies make EVs? Yep. Will Ford ever catch up to Tesla while operating the way it does? Nope.

Elon doesn't suffer fools and is very focused. Ford management is almost the polar opposite. They have constant shiny object syndrome while making sure they stay entrenched politically. I've heard at Tesla it's sink or swim with management support. Elon will sit down and solve a problem with engineering. Ford is sink or swim so you can become a scapegoat. Very few managers are capable or willing to solve anything technical. Fear based culture for the wrong motivations. Fear based on failing to please the politicians that litter the upper ranks. Tesla there seems to be a fear of failure because of the principal of failing. I've worked at Ford. Cannot say I'd want to work at Tesla either. But you have to understand they are so different and Ford will never catch up.

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Post ID: @f8+1kyaw1jgh

That’s debatable, this was elons FU to ford, he achieved it with a longer production run…

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Post ID: @cs+1kyaw1jgh

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