business

DEARBORN, MICH. – As Ford Motor Co. faces perhaps the most difficult period in its 105-year history, it’s trying to boost employee confidence by showing them — and letting them drive — the vehicles it hopes will pull the storied automaker out of the financial basement.
Last week, Ford started pulling around 4,000 workers from their desks at sites near the Dearborn headquarters and onto a test track for a few hours of driving and learning about how Ford hopes to set its vehicles apart from other automakers.
“There’s obviously some worry,” product creation worker Sejal Shreffler said Monday after sitting in a Mondeo, Ford’s European midsize sedan that eventually will make its way to the United States when Ford begins manufacturing midsize cars globally. “It certainly seems like if we could get some of these vehicles over here we’d be headed in a better direction.”
Ford is hoping the workers who go through the sessions will be able to talk up the company’s vehicles.
It also hopes to boost confidence that Ford has products coming that people will want to buy.
First, the workers went into a tent where engineers and other trainers told them about how Ford wants to set itself apart with features such as sportier-driving vehicles, comfortable but firm seats, solid-feeling switches and dashboard instruments that set the brands apart. In Fords, for instance, all vehicles will have dark-blue lighted instruments. Vehicles, including a 2010 Mustang, a Mondeo and even a small European van, were on display.
Then it was off to the test track, where the workers split into groups to drive everything from a prototype hydrogen ­fuel cell-powered Focus to a Lincoln MKS luxury sedan with a new turbocharged V-6 engine that has the power of a V-8 with around 20 percent better gas mileage.
“I could get in trouble with this,” electrical engineer Bill Morris said after zipping through some bumpy curves in an MKS equipped with the turbo engine, which Ford has named EcoBoost. The engines will roll out in the MKS starting in early 2009.
Most of the vehicles the workers were able to drive were 2009 or 2010 models of cars and trucks on the market, a lineup that for the most part hasn’t sold well this year.
Ford sales are off nearly 14 percent through the first seven months of the year, with U.S. car sales off almost 5 percent and trucks down over 18 percent. Overall, the U.S. market is down 10 percent with growth in small cars and drops in truck and sport-utility vehicle sales.
The sales slump contributed to Ford losing $8.7 billion in the second quarter as it races to adjust from trucks to a stronger car lineup. The company has said it will bring over several small car models from Europe, including the Fiesta subcompact and the European Focus compact, in 2010.
It abandoned a forecast of returning to profitability in 2009 and can’t say when it will make money again. Still, workers like Morris say they’re confident in Ford’s future given the better products it will offer.