Quote:
Originally Posted by wbt
Not sure I agree. It wouldn't take Ford much to make those changes. There isn't any extra tooling required except for some minor revisions to the rear quarter panels and then they may be able to get away with a rear fascia change.
Hood and front fascia are already available from their supplier. Not much change on how it mounts.
This sounds viable to me.
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How can you say that the hood & fascia are already available when you haven't seen what, if any, the refresh is going to be? And even if they are available from somewhere, how do you know what sort of production volume that supplier is geared up for? There is a massive difference between a few hundred a year and a few hundred a day.
Anything that can affect a cars crash worthiness or fuel economy costs a
lot of money. Thats on top of the validation costs that they need to run for any component. And of course, the tooling cost. Even a light refresh quickly becomes a lot more expensive than you'd think.
Think about the business case ... if you do nothing, you have no increased cost but a slight decrease in sales. Doing a refresh will lead to improved sales, but add cost. The question becomes, how big would the gap between the two be? And do you make enough on each extra sale (after subtracting the build cost, and incentives and other per-unit costs) to cover the cost of doing the refresh.
For example, lets say it costs $100M to do a
very light refresh on the Camaro. This leads to sales going up by, I don't know how about 15k units per year over what it would have originally done. Profit per vehicle is something like $2500. GM sells this refreshed Camaro for 2 years. That works out to ... $75M in extra revenue, leaving them $25M short of their initial investment. In other words, they'd be better off doing nothing for those 2 years and taking the sales hit. And I'm probably being conservative on the cost here, and generous on the profit. Replace GM with Ford, and Camaro with Mustang if you like ... the numbers won't change