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Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Ford Releases Minivan by Any Other Name
By Darryl R. Isherwood
FOXBusiness
Ford (F) doesn’t want you to call its latest family car a minivan.
It’s built to carry families and seats seven but it’s not a minivan. It has three rows of seats and sliding doors, but it’s not a mini-van. Ford got out of the mini-van business two years ago.
What it is, says Ford, is “a people mover” that provides “…functionality in an aspirational design.”
Ford unveiled the Grand C-Max Tuesday at the Frankfurt auto show and says it plans to bring the vehicle to the U.S. in 2011 in an effort to capitalize on the demand for small, family cars.
The Grand C-Max will be built on Ford’s C-car platform, and is based on the Focus compact car. The carm aker hopes to one day market as many as 10 models of the C-Max worldwide.
Ford said sales of so-called B and C segment compact cars accounted for less than 15% of all sales in 2004, but so far this year has reached nearly 22% of industry sales, making it a fast growing segment of the auto market.
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