10 August 2021
A 2021 Ford Bronco By Any Color Other Than Blue —
Is now your 2022 Ford Bronco.
The car enthusiasts in America are shaking the blues away!
By going green!
And then not going green. Here, in California, with the toggle-switch economy, the off-on button has worn out, and so has the trepidation factor, in anything, but, most of all, in buying a new car.
I’ve only recently learned of the exterior color jitters amongst we prospective Bronco Reservation Holders who could become Order-ers (who could, in time, become buyers!).
A rather high anxiety level has persisted among the 130,000 or so nationwide Reservation-Holders over their demand for a green-tone exterior, a shade that never existed for the New Bronco in the first place. Historically, there had always been a GREEN color. But now there’s none among the chroma on the Color Brochure. One car-spy has informed the huddled paranoids that there WILL be a green color.
Bronco Fans wanted to know from the Ford Folks: What’s up with that?
The customers-on-the-list were teased by Ford with “Maybe Next Year.”
Next year is fast approaching. The green-lovers persist in trying to shake their blues away. Their cold sweat, however, shivers in comparison to the existential angst over the blue-shade range fading into the Bronco sunset.
The color choices are the next vast unknown to the final frontier of the 2022 Ford Bronco.
The website Bronco6G details the ongoing drama of the continuing tale of the longest-awaited U.S. vehicle in U.S. vehicle history.
Quality control problems have plagued the manufacturing of the removable hard-top of the New Bronco. The lift-off roof is fabricated and supplied by a German company, for this American conveyance machine, made in Michigan. This component part is “rumored” to be experiencing design flaws and humongous production glitches.
And what good is a highly-coveted, classic automotive beast without a roof? Topless is no longer fashionable in an America that’s lost its heads, in so many ways!
We’re on a week-by-week basis here, keeping track of the shortages of components, referred to by Ford as “commodities”.
The automotive computer chip HAD taken first place during this past spring 2021 as the lacking but fundamental commodity. Then, in June, the chip crisis was resolved, at least for the New Bronco. A supply source had been found. In July, the removable roof problem then emerged as the primary shortage crisis.
Which brings us to August. The “roof s***show”, as the frustrating flaws are correctly called, has not been fixed. That dilemma, however, has been eclipsed by Mr. Chip, who is presently back on top of the shortage pile, having only recently raced to first place in the pole position as the #1 Missing COMMODITY.
This vehicle of destiny has more stampede-effect going for it than any other piece of merchandise that I’ve ever seen promoted in this bastion of capitalism. The Bronco-love just deepens, in direct proportion to the deep-seated hatred and suspicion of the Ford Motor Company. According to Bronco aficionados, FoMoCo, and its CEO, can go to you-know-ho, but only after the 2022 Bronco busts out of its stall!
This entire fiasco has been a long time in the making, longer than customers have been waiting for the New Ford Bronco.
The Fifth Generation Bronco ceased production in 1996. The widely adopted manufacturing supply-chain method is currently strangling any chance of productive production; and it is important to understand how “Detroit” used to do it.
In the good old days of Motown and Detroit steel, before the Great Lakes, on both sides of the border, became the Rust Belt, the car components were all made in that region. They were stockpiled, and shipped to various assembly plants throughout the USA. Even California once had the huge assembly plant, pre-Shark, in little San Jose (it was actually in Milpitas). That proud workplace made the most vintage Mustangs in the history of that iron pony.
Since those benevolent 1970s, this manufacturing process changed, for the worse. This new process is called the Just-In-Time Supply Chain Method, or JIT. It was developed by Toyota in the early 1970s, was vigorously adopted by Dell Computers in the 1990s, and then spread like downsizing-wildfire among industries in the manufacturing sectors in the U.S.A.
Just in time just ran out of time! And commodities. And, eventually, customers, the people who can’t wait forever for a Ford.
Fifty years is an incredibly long time for any evolving business to not have instituted contingency plans, emergency back-up, systemic alterations or dynamic adjustments within that commercial system of operations. It’s like running a household in 2020 as if it’s 1970. Those fifty years were invested by an automobile company in becoming further entrenched, and trapped, in a fixed and rigid process that must, for survival, change.
And change it must!
The silver lining of the grim COVID cloud is this:
These capitalist industries did not adapt naturally; they must now undergo forced adaptation to a fiscal reality they cannot change, regulate, lobby their way out of, edict into 2030, bribe away, or even legally escape. Those American corporations floated on their own inbred inefficiencies for decades, and deemed their successes the result of rusting away in decrepit “free”-market models and supply chains of yesteryear, aided by corporate welfare to cushion their costs, direct, indirect and future (aka pensions); and the future is now.
JIT was designed to transport the requisite materials and parts (COMMODITIES) just before the company needs them, thereby eliminating the need for a warehouse for surplus parts, for ANY parts. The COVID-pandemic panic revealed the enormous weaknesses in this cost-cutting scheme — spread out over global proportions. And now international commerce is unable to catch up quickly, or at all, with supply lines that still reach out across oceans.
CEOs humming, out-of-tune, I might add, “It’s a Small Small World” ain’t drowning out the argument for Made in The USA. That Disney fantasy is drowning out sales. Even Disney is setting records for layoffs in 2021.
I highly doubt the ghastly consequences of those delusional business decisions, with their lack of foresight, insight, hindsight, future sight, any sight, were even contemplated by the CEOs, the industry “experts”, and the habitual culprits, the politicians, during the fateful year of 2020.
The JIT chaos promises to make the making of my 2021/2022/???? Bronco a convoluted creation of a legacy that began way back in January 2017. We’re all shaking the summertime blues away as the shades of blue vanish, to be replaced by who knows what color?
I frankly think the Color Obsession is a planned corporate distraction from the real problems of FoMoCo, and who knows how many there are of those delightful deficits?!
Today’s color leak hints that 3 new hues are on the way!
But, back to the non-existent green that might, or might not, externalize:
That green was initially to be called “Everglades Green”, but then that shade showed up on a color chart for the 2022 Mustang — which, ICYMI, happens to be the only CAR that FoMoCo manufactures anymore. (I always found the Taurus an insult to my zodiac sign!)
Everglades Green then became Eruption Green; today’s eruption-buzz is that the name is Overland Green, a nuance that looks a lot like Cayman Green, as in that tropical tax-haven paradise among a chain of Caribbean islands. Cayman Green was the name of the 1992 Ford Explorer that the Milligan family owned.
A 30-year turn of the steering wheel for that color!
I understand that the color “Cactus Gray” (with an A) is holding fast, hanging in there on the color chart, as of this week.
By next month, who knows what the colors will be for the New Ford Bronco. This vehicle is destined to make some sort of history for whoever progresses from the status of Reservation Holder to Owner. I’ve set my sights on an extremely basic package, so the likelihood is fairly high that my Bronco will materialize before my very eyes. The more elaborate, tarted-up models could become four-wheeler fantasies that never quite came true.
This legend is approaching soap opera territory as it intensifies and moves on — to another day, another week, another month, another year.
Yesterday, on The Legend Returns . . .