It doesn't mean that Ford didn't help to develop these technologies and hardware.

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I agree with Hamud. Mazda develops with Ford backing. I don't think Ford will pull out completely, it's in both companies' best interest to continue sharing input.

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hardware...ie control arms, frames, etc.
these cost to manufacture but in effort to save $ ford does the manufacturing of them internally/vendors/whatever for mazda/volvo while being allowed to use their designs and mazda/volvo gets the manufactured design.

so they aren't giving good design, just good hardware from their design.

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That's what happends when you pump money into another company and gain a large stake. You then exercise your right to use their technology.

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If you want rehash political crap, take it somewhere else. We're talking about Mazda and Ford here. May I suggest a good psychiratrist for your BDS?

Ok... back to the subject at hand. Ford will continue to use Mazda tech. It won't change the relationship between companies. But the sale of stock will give Ford something it needs - capital.

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Why use Mazda tech?

Look Daewoo builds cars for GM, the only difference between Daewoo and Chevy and Pontiac is the badge.

Why not do the same with Mazda, only thing is Mazda make great cars. So if Mazda could design, develop and build a new Focus sized car, that would solve all Fords problems.

In other words picture this, if the new Mazda 3 was simply sold as a Focus, that car would be a huge hit. But the key is that Mazda needs to build that car with ZERO input from Ford.

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What does this have to do with Mazda? I think you you typed in the wrong address into your browser bar.

Yep, everything is Bush's fault and Obama will fix all that is wrong in the world. Yeah, right.

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Well, they back to school for you, because you didn't get any of the historical context of the Great Depression. Nor do you have any idea of the context of what's going on now.

That, and you are a troll. Go away little boy.

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Blame Bill Clinton, Barney Frank, and Chris Dodd. Liberal idiot.

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"I've studied the Great Depression in history classes."

Then you must have read about Roosevelt's address to the nation on television - the one Joe Biden talked about.

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@ Billy bob, i see your point about Barney and Dodd, but come on already, Bill Clinton did an excellent job, especially if you compare his 8 years head to head with someone else's 8 years (let's not name any names)

btw i am a Republican.

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@Flashpoint, and anyone else who wants to blame just one party or the other for the economic crisis:

FactCheck.org:
There's plenty of blame to go around, and it doesn't fasten only on one party or even mainly on what Washington did or didn't do. As The Economist magazine noted recently, the problem is one of "layered irresponsibility ... with hard-working homeowners and billionaire villains each playing a role." Here's a partial list of those alleged to be at fault:
• The Federal Reserve, which slashed interest rates after the dot-com bubble burst, making credit cheap.
• Home buyers, who took advantage of easy credit to bid up the prices of homes excessively.
• Congress, which continues to support a mortgage tax deduction that gives consumers a tax incentive to buy more expensive houses.
• Real estate agents, most of whom work for the sellers rather than the buyers and who earned higher commissions from selling more expensive homes.
• The Clinton administration, which pushed for less stringent credit and downpayment requirements for working- and middle-class families.
• Mortgage brokers, who offered less-credit-worthy home buyers subprime, adjustable rate loans with low initial payments, but exploding interest rates.
• Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, who in 2004, near the peak of the housing bubble, encouraged Americans to take out adjustable rate mortgages.
• Wall Street firms, who paid too little attention to the quality of the risky loans that they bundled into Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS), and issued bonds using those securities as collateral.
• The Bush administration, which failed to provide needed government oversight of the increasingly dicey mortgage-backed securities market.
• An obscure accounting rule called mark-to-market, which can have the paradoxical result of making assets be worth less on paper than they are in reality during times of panic.
• Collective delusion, or a belief on the part of all parties that home prices would keep rising forever, no matter how high or how fast they had already gone up.
The U.S. economy is enormously complicated. Screwing it up takes a great deal of cooperation.

Quoted article at:
http://www.factcheck.org/elections-2008/who_caused_the_economic_crisis.html

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Ford Europe uses more Mazda tech, most of the good cars, are largely Mazda, the good Ford Focus the one in Europe is based on the C1 platform that was largely developed by .... Mazda and to some extent Volvo, You can see the C1 in the US in the form of the Mazda 3. The Ford Festiva is pretty much a badge job on the Mazda 2, Ford Kuga, based on a modified version of the C1 platform used in the Focus, The Mondeo is based off a Volvo Platform known as EUCD which was ... based on the C1 platform. All the Euro only Fords that people want in the US seem to have a lot of input from Mazda, ... well ok the Ford Ka is actually a Fiat.

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if i'm not mistaken, i believe even euro ford's use mazda/volvo designs. ie. drivetrains, (some) engines, and other various parts. Essentially, if true they'd still need them

As for the first portion of your comment, they don't get everything from Mazda/volvo. Ford likes to tinker a bit and try making their own thing. That sometimes ends with less then stellar results. Chances are ford goes "i like that, but i also want to add this and maybe this. also, could we cut costs a little somehow?"

Plus, it's not that the cars themselves are bad but that once they make it through fords hands they cheapened up the interior and sloppied up the exterior to what they think American's really want.

One could argue that they do a good job of it because they sell more then mazda or volvo's versions of the same drive train and I won't argue with that but that just never computes in my head. There's rarely a Ford outside & inside I actually can tolerate for longer then a test drive. To each his/her own though.

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