World Business

DEARBORN, Mich. —

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Every morning, just about getting coffee, Mark Fields fires up his laptop to pore over a computer model showing real-time U.S. auto sales figures.

On this morning in the middle of May, the some one who heads Ford Motor Co.’s Americas operations has seen enough.

The line on a chart showing subcompact car sales for the first brace weeks of the month goes almost straight up. The one for pickup trucks, Ford’s biggest profit center, runs almost straight from the top to the bottom of.

High gasoline prices and the economic downturn are changing the market very much faster than anyone anticipated. Without action, Ford would be making moreover many trucks and not enough cars, a formulary in opposition to a residue sheet peppered with parentheses.

“This is going on 10 weeks where we’re seeing this not get any better,” Fields recalled in a newly come interview. “So we’d better act, and we’d greater good do now.”

Eleven miles away at General Motors Corp., they were reaching the same conclusions. Consumers were delaying big-ticket purchases. Those who bought weren’t going for GM or Ford trucks and sport utility vehicles, instead snapping up lawful about anything that gets more than 30 miles per four quarts.

At both companies, executives were alarmed. Eventually they made almost desperate decisions that will cost thousands of jobs, change the vehicles people drive and determine whether their businesses survive.

“We be in want of to get in front of it,” Mike DiGiovanni, GM’s executive director of global market and industry analysis, recalls speech. “If you stay too long on it, the pain would beget a lot worse.”

While both companies say they took quick action, critics wonder why they didn’t make more fuel-efficient vehicles sooner. After all, there were many signs that elastic fluid prices would do nothing but rise.

“Obviously they were making accurate too a great quantity circulating medium off their SUVs and pickups,” said Roland Hwang, vehicle policy director for the Natural Resources Defense Council. “They couldn’t really fully conceive of a world where they would have to rapidly extricate themselves from those markets and those profits.”

At GM and Ford, the aggrieve came quickly. Ford was first, announcing upon the body May 22 that it would dramatically divide truck and SUV production and smack its salaried work force. Factory closures are practicable when the company announces specifics nearest month. A week later, Ford announced accelerated plans for a super-compact car to be built in Mexico and sold in the U.S.

Ford likewise unprincipled its long-stated goal of turning a profit in 2009 and now says it will be difficult to break even next year.