Ford (F) And The Self-Parking Car Debacle

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Apr 27, 9:36PM EDT · Published Dec 30, 6:10AM EST

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"Baby, you can drive my car /yes, I’m gonna be a star/ Baby you can drive my car /And maybe I’ll love you."–The Beatles.

The matchless idiocy which has defined the fall of the US car industry can be summed up by one event. Ford (F) is introducing a "self-parking" automobile.

According to The Wall Street Journal, "Ford Motor Co. plans to offer two Lincoln models next year that can park themselves, the latest move in a strategy aimed at improving the public’s image of the auto maker." It is hard to imagine how the "improvement" part of that works.

Somewhere in the bowels of the Ford design center an overeducated engineer came up with a plan which would allow a driver to get out of his car and watch it move its big, shiny body into a parking space. The engineer probably got a new patent to his name. A product development team then drew up a budget for the thing–probably several million dollars. It then went over to "The Glass House", Ford’s headquarters, and though an inept process, the program was approved.

No one knows for certain, but the new parking feature will probably add about $1,000 to the cost of a Lincoln, which is the division of Ford which will offer the option.

New, complex car features may well cost more to develop than they bring in as revenue. They are "elective" portions of the car-buying experience. If a consumer does not want to have his car parked by his car, he will simply say "no" to the $1,000.

Every time an American car company adds complexity to its manufacturing process it costs money. Ditto for developing features. At that point, another hurdle has been created for the consumer to ponder. A feature is not a feature if no one wants it.

Douglas A. McIntyre

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.