Auto 'Mea Culpas' Line Chicago's Halls

2008 Ford Taurus

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Chicago — This year’s Chicago Auto Show saw enough admissions of four-wheeled foibles by auto manufacturers to pack a Dr. Phil book.

The most obvious example was Ford’s return to the Ford Taurus name, which officially ceased to exist in October, only to be resurrected less than a year after its official demise. The announcement that the Five Hundred sedan will be renamed the Taurus this summer coincides with the arrival of a more-powerful V6 engine under the car’s hood, an engine that Ford’s president of the Americas, Mark Fields, had said only a month ago at the Detroit auto show was slated for the Five Hundred sedan.

The slow-selling Freestyle — an overgrown wagon that’s not quite an SUV — will also receive the new engine and gets its name changed to the Taurus X. The Mercury Montego, twin to the Ford Five Hundred, will receive the old Sable name, long the Mercury equivalent to Ford’s Taurus.

This leaves the four-year-old strategy of using alliteration to reinforce Ford’s mainstream models on very shaky ground, if not officially dead. Ford now says that it will name products by “evaluating each vehicle individually,” according to the company’s marketing spokesperson Jim Kane. Beginning each model with an “F” “was never a hard and fast rule,” he said.

Naseem Javed, president and founder of ABC Namebank Inc., a New York-based global marketing firm that specializes in corporate nomenclatures, said that the Taurus name was obviously stronger than the Five Hundred in recognition, and called Ford’s alliteration strategy a fiasco. “They made a grave mistake by going after the alliteration with all their ‘F’ names,” said Javed. “After a time, you couldn’t tell one from the other.”

In announcing the name change, Ford’s Fields said the main problem with the names wasn’t confusion, but awareness. “Only four in 10 people knew there was a Ford Five Hundred on the market, and less so for the others,” said Fields at the Chicago show quoting a Ford owners. “The Ford Taurus name was still recognized by 80 percent of our customers, third best overall in our list.”

Fields suggested that the company could have spent big ad bucks to increase the recognition factor of these “F” models, but instead decided that resurrecting the Taurus and Sable names would be a smarter move.

“Ford needs a good overall package to make a car popular, whatever its name,” said Consumer Reports director of automobile analysis Doug Love. But all this name-flipping by Ford, including the name switch of the 2006 Lincoln Zephyr to the 2007 Lincoln MKZ, makes it appear as if Ford executives are just trying to put out fires, he said.

“Everybody rushes over here to do this, rushes there to do that,” Love said. “It doesn’t seem to be very cohesive from a marketing strategy standpoint.”

2008 Volkswagen R32

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Ford wasn’t the only company to publicly announce major shifts in marketing focus in Chicago. Volkswagen admitted, in a roundabout way, that it has given up efforts to pursue part of the North American luxury market, which had been a key focus several years ago, spearheaded by the launch of its pricey Phaeton sedan that never took off in the U.S. and left the market in 2007.

“Our growth last year can be attributed to excellent response to the new Rabbit and returning to Volkswagen’s roots — value and German engineering in a fun package,” said David Goggins, VW’s director of marketing and product strategy.

While unveiling the latest limited-edition VW R32 — a high-performance version of the Rabbit/GTI — no mention was made of the Phaeton nor the V10 diesel engine option that shot the Touareg into luxury-class price levels. The vehicles Goggins did single out, however, are in line with the company’s renewed focus on “returning to Volkswagen’s roots” as the affordable, value-oriented German car company: They include the Tiguan compact SUV, arriving this fall; an all-new version of DaimlerChrysler’s minivan, which will arrive in 2008; followed closely by a 50-state emissions-legal Jetta diesel.

At GM, Saturn unveiled its new Astra that was cloned from GM’s European Opel division, which is a major sales hit overseas with more than 500,000 sold last year. But the Astra’s American debut represents the end of an era for Saturn: This model will replace the Ion by the end of 2007, marking the official passing of the brand’s unique rust- and dent-resistant plastic body panels, one of the main differentiators of Saturn vehicles when they launched in 1990.

2008 Saturn Astra

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GM poured billions of dollars into the Saturn brand and its cars by coming up with customer-friendly dealer experiences such as no-haggle pricing, all-new platforms and engines, unique labor agreements for its workers, as well as those expensive but dent-resistant composite body panels, which have helped keep Saturn resale prices high. Out of those differentiators, only the unique dealer experience remains.

Now the company says that the only difference between the steel-bodied European Opel Astra and the American Saturn Astra are the logos on the exterior and interior. As such, Saturn’s new tagline of “Like Always, Like Never Before” is perhaps the most accurate slogan in the business.

Another GM division, Pontiac, also made an announcement at the Chicago show that signals significant retrenching and a return to past practices: The company made a big splash with its all-new G8 sedan, which will be the first four-door Pontiac equipped with rear-wheel drive since 1986. Poised to compete with the rear-drive Chrysler 300 and Dodge Charger, the G8 will be based on the Commodore sedan now sold in Australia by GM’s Holden division, although with a character and content tailored to fit North American preferences.