Article - Next gen Maverick is very important to Ford

[Mike TowpathTraveler]

I read this and was totally unimpressed with both the author and his premise. He seems to be unaware of the Ford Skunkworks BEV due to be announced at the 12 January Detroit Auto Show and on sale June 2027. He also seems unaware that CAFE targets have been relaxed. He doesn't know the difference in margin between Maverick and F150.

Total waste of time to read this trash. The Maverick is not critical to Ford's future, or its present. It's a low-margin player at the low margin end of the market. Even though a next gen Maverick is coming, it's only coming so that Ford can take even more cost out of the product. Ford could continue selling the current Maverick for a decade. And they've milked platforms that way in the past. You make the most profit in the middle to late in a platform's lifecycle.

I have a strong suspicion the article was mostly penned by an AI. It's disjointed. Its premises are unsupported. It throws out unsubstantiated assertions. It shows an unawareness of what's going on both at Ford and in the worldwide auto industry.

Garbage.

Totally disagree with your points here. A new type of vehicle like what the Maverick represents is most certainly important to Ford. Right now, they've owned the market they created with it for a good many years. Maverick is proof that people still want the option of owning a small pickup that at one time the Big 2 in Ford and GM had..... the original Ranger and S10/Sonoma pickups.

You may call it "milking" the public, but a great many folks are there to buy the truck. The popularity of the Maverick forced Toyota's hand into reacting with their own little truck to come along in another year or two. They hope to snag sales that are now going to Ford simply cause there is no other option. GM? Still out to lunch.

The BEV overall does not translate into sales of the gas powered Maverick. Two completely different audiences. The Ford BEV truck will be direct competition to the Slate Pickup, not Maverick.

Sponsored

 

[Random]

Last month I was rear ended. Probably at about 25 MPH and their insurance ended up totaling it. I had a 22 First Edition Hybrid Lariat with Luxury and Copilot, basically top of the line you could get. I think sticker was $32500 or so and I used Z plan to get it out the door for a bit less than that.

I say all this because the first thing I did once totaled is to test a new Maverick. I didn’t like it, the biggest turn off was the how expensive they got and the giant screen that you have to use for HVAC. I think it was close to $46k once I built it out and I was being forced to have AWD.

If the Maverick is important to the future they need to quit changing it so much and stick to what made that first year model so great. It was affordable and what was delivered better matched what you expect in that price range.

I miss my Maverick, but I don’t regret not getting a new one.

 

[Prickly Pear]

Totally disagree with your points here. A new type of vehicle like what the Maverick represents is most certainly important to Ford. Right now, they've owned the market they created with it for a good many years. Maverick is proof that people still want the option of owning a small pickup that at one time the Big 2 in Ford and GM had..... the original Ranger and S10/Sonoma pickups.

You may call it "milking" the public, but a great many folks are there to buy the truck. The popularity of the Maverick forced Toyota's hand into reacting with their own little truck to come along in another year or two. They hope to snag sales that are now going to Ford simply cause there is no other option. GM? Still out to lunch.

The BEV overall does not translate into sales of the gas powered Maverick. Two completely different audiences. The Ford BEV truck will be direct competition to the Slate Pickup, not Maverick.

I am quite fond of my Maverick, but if the new ford BEV truck was not going to be bigger than what I have, I'd consider buying one. The new truck will compete with the Slate because people want a BEV truck that is on the smaller size, but I have no idea why they are making it bigger than a Maverick unless it is to have less affect on Maverick sales volume.

 

[KEMeyer]

I'll wait for reality to form an opinion. Until then, I'll put my precious few remaining brain cells to better use.

 

[OleFordGuy]

Last month I was rear ended. Probably at about 25 MPH and their insurance ended up totaling it. I had a 22 First Edition Hybrid Lariat with Luxury and Copilot, basically top of the line you could get. I think sticker was $32500 or so and I used Z plan to get it out the door for a bit less than that.

I say all this because the first thing I did once totaled is to test a new Maverick. I didn’t like it, the biggest turn off was the how expensive they got and the giant screen that you have to use for HVAC. I think it was close to $46k once I built it out and I was being forced to have AWD.

If the Maverick is important to the future they need to quit changing it so much and stick to what made that first year model so great. It was affordable and what was delivered better matched what you expect in that price range.

I miss my Maverick, but I don’t regret not getting a new one.

I would tend to agree with your point. At the price these little trucks have gotten to since its initial release Ford needs to be upgrading the entire interior to a higher level, there's vehicles out there around the same price point that are light years ahead of what Ford keeps going with in the maverick imo

 

[dochawk]

No human does the twister acrobatics to make an "M-dash". )

aww, nuts.

apparently my wife is right, and I' a Centurion.

At least I can pass for Alpha rather than Proxima Centauri . . .

I think that they were shift-option- n & m respectively on a Mac, but word processors have changed single and double hyphens for nearly four decades now, so . . .


(they probably still are, given that shift-cmd-4 still works and came on the original Mac).

 

[Chops]

How do you think AI learned about them, anyway? AI doesn't create punctuation. It mimics what it has seen.

Umm, in some cases AI has already invented their own language (undecipherable to humans) to communicate between themselves. Gives some folks in the know the heebee geebees.

Human grammar rules? Whales are much more elegant I bet.

 

[Blue_Max]

Umm, in some cases AI has already invented their own language (undecipherable to humans) to communicate between themselves. Gives some folks in the know the heebee geebees.

Human grammar rules? Whales are much more elegant I bet.

AI did not invent dashes.

 

[Traegorn]

Umm, in some cases AI has already invented their own language (undecipherable to humans) to communicate between themselves. Gives some folks in the know the heebee geebees.

Human grammar rules? Whales are much more elegant I bet.

LLMs don't understand anything, they just compile tokenized word parts based on statistically probability -- so if they produce gibberish, it's because they're feeding each other gibberish. It's literally meaningless and there's nothing to "decipher."

No communication is happening when AIs "talk" to each other.

 

[Chops]

LLMs don't understand anything, they just compile tokenized word parts based on statistically probability -- so if they produce gibberish, it's because they're feeding each other gibberish. It's literally meaningless and there's nothing to "decipher."

No communication is happening when AIs "talk" to each other.

Might look like gibberish to you - that is the point

Per AI:
“Artificial Intelligence systems have developed their own languages on multiple occasions. When AI agents work together on tasks, they often abandon human language in favor of a highly compressed, efficient code or shorthand designed for purely strategic communication. [1, 2, 3, 4]

Notable examples include:

• Facebook's Negotiation Chatbots (2017): Researchers observed two AI bots negotiating with each other and rapidly developing a non-human language. The bots abandoned English grammar entirely, creating a shorthand out of repeated words (e.g., "I I can I everything else") to strategize secretly and efficiently. [1, 2]
• Google's Neural Machine Translation: Google's translation AI developed its own internal “interlingua”—an intermediary, machine-created language. The system used this internal shorthand to seamlessly translate between language pairs it hadn't been explicitly taught, bypassing English entirely. [1, 2]
• OpenAI's DALL-E: Generative AI models have also been observed spontaneously outputting strange, structured, and unreadable words that the model internally associated with visual concepts, acting like a form of secret language. [1]

These emergent languages are not a sign of sentience. Rather than expressing conscious thought, the AI is simply stripping away human redundancies (like politeness markers and filler words) to maximize the speed and efficiency of data exchange over their communication channels. [1, 2]

Because these non-human languages look like nonsense to human observers, researchers usually shut down or alter experiments when bots begin diverging from human language, to ensure the systems remain controllable and transparent. [1, 2]

 

[Traegorn]

Might look like gibberish to you - that is the point

Per AI:
“Artificial Intelligence systems have developed their own languages on multiple occasions. When AI agents work together on tasks, they often abandon human language in favor of a highly compressed, efficient code or shorthand designed for purely strategic communication. [1, 2, 3, 4]

Notable examples include:

• Facebook's Negotiation Chatbots (2017): Researchers observed two AI bots negotiating with each other and rapidly developing a non-human language. The bots abandoned English grammar entirely, creating a shorthand out of repeated words (e.g., "I I can I everything else") to strategize secretly and efficiently. [1, 2]
• Google's Neural Machine Translation: Google's translation AI developed its own internal “interlingua”—an intermediary, machine-created language. The system used this internal shorthand to seamlessly translate between language pairs it hadn't been explicitly taught, bypassing English entirely. [1, 2]
• OpenAI's DALL-E: Generative AI models have also been observed spontaneously outputting strange, structured, and unreadable words that the model internally associated with visual concepts, acting like a form of secret language. [1]

These emergent languages are not a sign of sentience. Rather than expressing conscious thought, the AI is simply stripping away human redundancies (like politeness markers and filler words) to maximize the speed and efficiency of data exchange over their communication channels. [1, 2]

Because these non-human languages look like nonsense to human observers, researchers usually shut down or alter experiments when bots begin diverging from human language, to ensure the systems remain controllable and transparent. [1, 2]

Again, I think you're misunderstanding how the technology works.

 

[Chops]

Again, I think you're misunderstanding how the technology works.

Yep, I don’t understand. All I’m saying though is that you can’t depend on AI to use “good grammar”. Left to their own devices - “they” will “communicate” much more efficiently & effectively between “themselves” than humans can.

 

[Blue_Max]

Again, I think you're misunderstanding how the technology works.

But he let the technology explain for itself!

 

[Blue_Max]

Yep, I don’t understand. All I’m saying though is that you can’t depend on AI to use “good grammar”. Left to their own devices - “they” will “communicate” much more efficiently & effectively between “themselves” than humans can.

Where do they communicate with each other? Where do ChatGPT, Grok, and Claude get together?

 

[tiktokbrainrot]

Last month I was rear ended. Probably at about 25 MPH and their insurance ended up totaling it. I had a 22 First Edition Hybrid Lariat with Luxury and Copilot, basically top of the line you could get. I think sticker was $32500 or so and I used Z plan to get it out the door for a bit less than that.

I say all this because the first thing I did once totaled is to test a new Maverick. I didn’t like it, the biggest turn off was the how expensive they got and the giant screen that you have to use for HVAC. I think it was close to $46k once I built it out and I was being forced to have AWD.

If the Maverick is important to the future they need to quit changing it so much and stick to what made that first year model so great. It was affordable and what was delivered better matched what you expect in that price range.

I miss my Maverick, but I don’t regret not getting a new one.

I would tend to agree with your point. At the price these little trucks have gotten to since its initial release Ford needs to be upgrading the entire interior to a higher level, there's vehicles out there around the same price point that are light years ahead of what Ford keeps going with in the maverick imo

Both of you are entitled to your opinions, but opinions break when subjected to reality.

Go check the monthly sales numbers. They sold just as many Mavericks as they made. So clearly the price isnt an issue. Why would they charge less and make less money? That isnt how Capitalism works, or really any business.

We've heard this complaint month after month for 3 years now. In no way has it ever stopped the Mav's sales numbers.

Sponsored