Quote:
Originally Posted by DGthe3
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
|
Because we are talking about existing GT500 parts. They have already been tested. The parts are already in production. The parts bolt directly to the existing Mustang platform.
There is nothing special going on with tooling or testing. It would be very economical for Ford to make the cosmetic changes spoken of.
Why did Ford release the 2010 platform with cosmetic changes yet keep the drivetrain from the '05-'09 models? Why not wait another year and do it all at once in 2011?
Ford is agile. This is something their competitors are lacking giving them the competitive edge atm. I think GM is headed in the right direction but that is a few years down the road.