So Ford's dropping hints that it plans to get out of the minivan business entirely, opting instead for car-based crossover vehicles like the long-rumored "Fairlane" concept.
And I say it's long overdue.
The minivan market is a pretty mature subset of the North American vehicle market. DCX will always get the lion's share of minivan sales, simply because it invented the segment and continues to innovate. Honda and Toyota have made great inroads, and the Hyundai/Kia combine also is poised for growth.
Then there's GM and Ford, who I've always suspected sold minivans just so their executives' wives wouldn't have to buy Odysseys. Both companies joined the minivan field begrudgingly, bringing out truck-based rear-drive "mini" vans a year or two after Chrysler's 1984 minivans. Their first front-drive vans were disasters: GM's "Dustbuster" vans were too weird to a segment that wanted predictability ... and the Windstar managed to enter the market without a single innovation.
In fact, Ford's research proved laughably faulty when the Windstar came out, in suggesting that buyers didn't want vans with dual sliding rear doors. In fact, they did -- they just didn't know it yet. The Chrysler vans that came out at the same time pioneered dual sliding doors, and became hits. Ford had to settle for a larger driver's door with a flip-and-slide driver's seat until it could re-engineer the Windstar.
Now, GM and Ford mostly sell vans to fleet operations. GM says its minivan sales are up ... which I don't think takes into account the fact that they're being sold by one more division than they used to be ... and Ford's are way down, despite being sold in Ford AND Mercury showrooms.
So the rumored end of Ford's minivan production is, if true, a good thing. It lets the company devote more resources to vehicles folks might actually buy. People coming to Ford showrooms for a minivan -- yes, both of them -- will surely be as satisfied with the new Edge, or the unjustly-overlooked Freestyle, or the coming Fairlane. Leave the minivan market to DCX, Bill ... and come up with the Next Big Thing instead.
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