I certainly don't know the inside story of ford's impending demise, but one can guess. This is the company that made the edsel, remember? In the early 1950s they woke up and realized : HEY, we're making our cars TOO GOOD, they never wear out. The 1952+/- models just ran, and ran...and RAN. So in 1955 they came out with cars that fell apart after 3 years, thinking they had the public by the gonads. Then the japanese said : opportunity smiles, now foreign made cars are some 40% of the US market.....My dad always said : if it's a ford, it's a buckboard. No matter what they designed/built/called it, it was ALWAYS a bumpy buckboard. So old Henry put together horseless carriages with mass production as an successful innovation but that was about it, its been a reactionary, bunker mentality in the board room ever since. And so it goes with dinosaurs....the UAW and its greed is part of the problem but what you're seeing is evolution-in-action : the survival of the fittest...
Fix Or Repair Daily
I always bought Fords up to 1975. After that, their quality took a steep leap off a cliff.