On Monday Ford Motor company announced that they will be shutting down production of their F-150 pickup truck for a week. The demand for these American cars has been dropping and Ford has been feeling the heat from it. Ford’s F-150 truck has been the best-selling model in North America and Ford has seen steady growth in the last six years. But Ford was forced to shut down one of its Kentucky plants for the next week and temporarily idle production of several other plants in the US and Mexico. Reuters.com reports that 13,000 employees will be effected by these temporary shutdowns, 4,000 being in Mexico and 9,000 in the US.
The problem has been the sales of the F-150 model as there was a 3% drop in the overall sales of the truck across the nation. The demand for popular Ford automobiles has dropped in September with a general decrease in US auto sales. Many car producers have described the fall of sales as being a plateau for the industry. Ford’s change in production is simply a symptom of this plateau as consumers are looking for other modes of transportation or foreign automakers. Other large producers such as General Motors and Toyota Motor Corp. have yet to alter scheduled production for the month, but many analysts predict that we could see a general change of production across the US auto industry.