Car Audio

Posts Tagged ‘ford leasing’

The prices of Ford cars will be rising after the end of June by on average 4%. This is the third time since 2007 that they have rose their car prices. Ford rose their prices back in February by 4.7%, Ford then rose prices again in April by 3.75%.

Ford stated that it does sound strange to raise car prices during a recession, but they also said that they had no choice because of the weak pound, “there is no choice if we are to maintain a viable business”.

Ford said that at the end of 2007 the pound had been stable against the euro for 10 years at 1.43 euros, however, due to the recession, over the past 2 years, the pound has dropped to 1.16 euros.

Because Ford build their UK cars in Spain and Germany, Euro countries, they had no choice but to increase prices. Before these price rises, Ford had been absorbing the losses which end up around £3,500 for every vehicle sold, however, they cannot sustain this if they plan to keep a stable business, especially during the recession.

Not only are these price hikes a problem during the recession but they also have an affect on the governments car scrappage scheme because these price rises will take a huge chunk out of the money that would have been saved. With prices of a Ford Fiesta, Focus and Ka increasing by around £600. New car buyers won’t be benefitting as much when buying a new Ford under the car scrappage scheme.

Although this is all bad news for new car buyers, people choosing car leasing over buying won’t see the price rises straight away. Even if you are not currently on a Ford lease, but you are looking, the leasing companies won’t pass on the price rises until they buy new vehicles, which, during the recession, won’t happen straight away. So this is some good news for the leasing customers, not so much for new car buyers.

The car companies Ford, Nissan and Tesla have been given a combined sum of $8 billion by the Energy department of the US government. This money is planned for developing new electric cars, which in turn will create new jobs in the car industry.

The money is simply a low interest loan which the US has given out to help increase jobs in the car industry, aswell as developing greener cars in the process.

The money has been split quite largely. Ford has received the majority, $5.9 billion. This money will be spent developing new electric cars, aswell as new technology for current gasoline powered cars.

Ford will benefit alot from this money due to the extremely low interest rate of around 3.75%. If Ford had tried to get the money on the open market, they would have ended up paying double figure interest rates.

Nissan are getting another large chunk of the loan, $1.6 billion. They have said that this money will be going towards one of their plants that are developing lithium ion batteries. The new batteries developed will be going into a new electric car in development for 2012.

Finally Tesla, they are only getting a small sum comapred to the likes of Ford. Tesla will only be receiveing a loan of $465 million. A new factory in California is being developed to create their new Model S Sedan using part of their loan. The other money will be spent on creating new greener car parts for other car makers.

Now that these car manufacturers have been given this money, we should see some new electric cars come to the market in the next few years. Being able to choose from an electric car over gasoline would save a leaser even more money. I imagine a huge number of people with a Ford lease or Nissan lease would love to have an electric car as this would save them even more money.

Ford has released details that it has seen improvements in it’s market share of the US. The US car manufacturer announced that they sold 155,954 vehicles in May. Although this figure is down 24% from the same month last year, it’s actually a 20% increase on last months sales.

The increase in sales that Ford have seen could be down to the other car manufacturers such as Chrysler and General Motors who have both recently files for bankruptcy.

General Motors announced their figures the day after they filed for bankruptcy. They reported 191,875 vehicles sales last month which is a 30% drop on May 2008 sales, however, this is an 11% rise on last months sales. The worst performance in sales come from Hummer, Saab, Saturn and Pontiac, all of which GM are planning on selling on.

As for Chrysler, they filed for bankruptcy on April 30th and announced that they saw 79,010 sales from May which is a 47% decrease in US sales from the same month in 2008. They said that the majority of their sales have been down to a price cut from a huge number of dealers, this is because 789 dealers are planning to stop selling Chrysler cars next week.

Ford is currently in the process of changing their production strategy to try and take advantage of the bankruptcy situation. Ford have planned to put an extra 52,000 vehicles into production during the next 2 quarters.

The majority of car manufacturers have seen a drop in sales during the economic downturn, however, the drop in sales is not all down to a drop in public sales. Corporate sales have also been on the decrease, companies that offer Ford leasing aswell as a number of other makes such as Peugeot leasing are buying less cars because they are being hit by the credit crunch. The problem is that people rarely think about leasing a car which is generally the cheaper option, they normally think about buying a whole new car, and if they can’t afford it, they don’t bother.