DEARBORN, MI—Still reeling from a $12.6 billion loss last year and a steadily declining customer base, the Ford Motor Company announced plans Monday to invest its entire third- and fourth-quarter manufacturing and advertising budgets into reintroducing the Model T, one of history's best known and most innovative car models.
"Today's drivers want to get in touch with the experience of sitting behind the wheel of a finely crafted, planetary-gear vehicle with manual crank shafts," said Ford's president and CEO Alan Mulally, who expects the first line of Model Ts to be available for sale by mid-December and safe for driving as soon as it is neither snowing nor raining. "We're getting back to the basics, bringing the quality and elegance of 1908 into the 21st century. We want to show the country why, at one point, every single car driven in America was a Ford."
Although market analysts have for months predicted that the struggling company would sell off its less successful subsidiaries and expand into hybrid cars in order to remain economically viable, the Michigan-based auto producer decided instead to open 12 new factories and retrofit another seven at a cost of more than $100 million in order to produce parts such as the oil-lamp headlights and wooden artillery wheels for the two-speed Model T.
While Mulally admits that the initial cost of producing the so-called "Tin Lizzies" will be an enormous investment, the company will save millions of dollars by paying workers on the man-powered assembly lines—once considered a revolutionary breakthrough—wages at 1911 rates. Working in back-to-back 10-hour shifts, employees should be capable of producing 20 to 25 units per week, meaning the 32,000 Model Ts that Mulally believes will lift the company out of near bankruptcy will be on the road within six years.
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*The Onion
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