In August, the Chevrolet Cruze was the best-selling small car in the United States, beating its home-town competitor the Ford Focus. Preference and quality might not be the only reason for this as Ford simply can not keep up with the requests for their small car. According to an article by WardsAuto, George Pipas, a sales analyst for Ford, revealed that the Focus’s inventory is too low to garnish high sales.
“In the month of July, we had 5,500 Focuses on the ground. That’s a very low inventory position that was exacerbated by our normal (production) shutdown the first two weeks of July,” said Pipas. A year ago there were 27,000 Focuses available at the end of July. In the month of August, only 14,093 were sold which is a 12.4 percent drop compared to August 2010 sales. Ford is working toward increasing the production rate of the 2012 Focus, but new parts and new plant layouts are making it more difficult than the blue oval expected.
“It’s all of your suppliers and your materials and a new assembly plant all getting on the same page during launch.”
Source: WardsAuto
