Mulally says Ford dealerships must consolidate

“Ford intends to be the defining crossover company this decade, just as we defined SUVs in the 1990s,” Fields declared.

Ford has faced increasing competition from overseas rivals and may relinquish the No. 2 sales spot in the United States to Toyota Motor Corp. Mulally, who studied Toyota’s lean manufacturing system while a top executive at Boeing Co., said he was “in awe” of Toyota and said, “if you’re in manufacturing you should be because it is the machine that changed the world. They set the standard on making things that people really want.”

Flashing a mischievous smile, Mulally recounted his recent meeting with President Bush at the White House, where he showed the president Ford’s Edge HySeries with a plug-in hydrogen fuel cell.

Mulally said, “the most important thing is that I wanted the president to make sure that he plugged into the electricity and not into the hydrogen,” he said to laughs. “I’m going to pay for that — this is all off the record, right?”

The former aviation executive also recounted his work at Ford dealerships around the country in the last few weeks to become more intimately involved in the car business. He described winning over a couple who were wary about trading in their F-Series pickup truck for a new one.

Slide show   New York auto show is a blast Concept cars and new model debuts are featured at the New York International Auto show. more photos

“The clincher was that I tossed in the floor mats,” he said.

Elsewhere at the show, General Motors Corp. unveiled a trio of new Chevrolet minicar concept vehicles designed to grab the attention of young car buyers in urban markets around the world.

Bob Lutz, GM vice chairman for global product development, said the cars, which were designed at the automaker’s studio in South Korea, combine the style and flash that young people are looking for, along with affordability and fuel economy.

The vehicles also could give the world’s largest automaker a bigger foothold in the growing minicar market, which is largely dominated by the Japanese automakers. GM currently produces the Chevrolet Aveo sedan and five-door subcompact.

“These kinds of cars are small part of the market right now,” Lutz said at the New York International Auto Show. “But we believe if they’re cool enough people will buy them.”

The “triplets,” as Lutz called them, include the Beat, a front-wheel drive three-door hatchback powered by a 1.2-liter turbocharged gasoline engine; the Groove, a retro looking front-wheel drive car with a 1-liter diesel engine; and the Trax an “urban crossover” with an all-wheel-drive system and a 1-liter gas engine.

Lutz said it’s a “safe bet” that GM will begin production of at least one the vehicles in the “relatively near future.” He declined to put a price tag on the vehicles, but said that ideally they would start about $10,000 in the U.S. market.

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