Sunday Stealing: The Imaginary Meme, Part One

You remember New Coke, the soft drink that was gonna snag market share away from Pepsi. Instead New Coke hacked off a lot of loyal Coke drinkers and market share plummeted so badly that Coke brought back the old formula.

Ford is gonna pull the same stunt with the iconic Mustang brand.

Nancy’s first car was a 1966 Mustang. Like the one above, six cylinder automatic. She bought it with her own moola.

Girl Car!

Her dad had a fit when the first weekend she went through $30 worth of gas (at 17 cents a gallon.)

Mustangs were wildly popular when it was launched in 1965.

Not good enough says Ford.

Probably at the 50th anniversary of Mustang, 2015, Ford will piss off many loyal Mustang owners in an attempt to be relevant to a younger demographic – who don’t buy cars!

Targeting Baby Boomers with cars has lost it’s luster at Ford, while the rest of the marketing world is hitting the Baby Boomer demographic hard with new products and solutions.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Ford is working on a significant design overhaul for its signature Mustang that will see the next iteration keep the classic shark-nosed grille and round headlights but adopt an overall look closer to that of the new Ford Fusion.

Generation Y – those born between 1980 and 1999 – is the target Ford is aiming for.

“You cannot sustain sales without looking for new buyers. True, you are going to lose sales, but you need to refresh the population of buyers,”

Strategic Vision analyst Alexander Edwards told the Wall Street Journal.

“True you are going to lose sales”

A classic strategic vision if I’ve ever read one. Imagine how THAT meeting went down…

OK guys, you need to redesign a car that has been selling at an acceptable clip for fifty years. Never mind that there are thousands of Mustang Clubs around the world that are so in love with the brand they will buy two or three or more Mustangs. Forget those guys. Let’s focus on the people WHO DON”T BUY CARS.

Edwards says the current average Mustang buyer is 51 years old.

Exactly! The kind of car buyer that may will buy more than one Mustang – or keep updating his Pony every year or so.

Are you ready for a Mustang EV or hybrid, chocked full of accessories that do not improve performance?  iPhones and iPads and social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter?

Driving itself has become a lower priority for younger people with a 2011 study by the University of Michigan finding that just 65 per cent of 18-year-olds had their driver’s license  in 2008, down from 80 per cent in 1983.

Smooth move Ford.

The last rear-wheel drive Ford made in the US is the Mustang. (no more Crown Vics or Lincoln Town Cars.)

Soon the last rear-wheel CAR made in the US will be the Corvette.

Unless GM hires Strategic Vision to kill that brand too.

Nissan is bringing back the Datsun.

Kinda sorta.

They will use the retired name Datsun in Russia, India and Indonesia.  If you want to read how the name Datsun came to be, then disappeared and almost killed Nissan, check out this story.

We drove a Datsun 510 Station Wagon for a few years when we just had one rug muncher. Very similar looking to the image above – except we didn’t have a rack, and the side was full of dry pee.

After I crinkled the front fender – it was as easy as crumbling up Reynolds Aluminum Foil, I usef this as an excuse to try to learn an new hobby: auto body repair. I enrolled in the local adult education class which gave me access to some fine auto body repair equipment and all the Bondo I could handle.

It never looked good again.

We traded the Datsun for a really lame Chevrolet Cavalier Wagon because Eastern Airlines was giving away free tickets. Remember that? Buy a car and get free air travel.

Like Nissan killing Datsun for some stupid reason, General Motors decided that purchasing a car should mean you leave it home and do your traveling by plane.

We went to Cancun. The Datsun never would have made it.

Honolulu wants people to smell artificial while riding the city buses.

Natural scents will not be welcome – unless you have deodorant up your butt.

City Council members Rod Tam and Nestor Garcia hope to pass a bill that will ban riders with “odors that unreasonably disturb others or interfere with their use of the transit system, whether such odors arise from one’s person, clothes, articles accompanying animal or any other source.”

As Planet of the Chimps points out, it will take smell police to find the stinkers.

Inquiring minds are asking… would riders

• be expected to report the offense via a special “smell phone?”
• be required to rank the reek?
• Twitter the emitter?
• accuse the oozer?
• quench the stench (what about the French?)

By the way, have you been behind a bus lately?

I’ve been on the road a lot this past week. There a lot of trucks on the road.

All together now… durrrrr.

Being behind the wheel, whilst careening down the road at 83 miles per hour,  allows a lot of think time.

I’ve seen long-haul truckers:

• parallel park on the Champs de Elvis in Memphis
• drive three wide in Hurricane Culligan at 83 mph
• flirt with Glinda, eat meat and three, pass gas, all in less than the time it takes me to find my Jon and Kate Wilkes booth
• pick their teeth with a Bowie knife and not draw blood
• with tri-trailers do a reverse 180, release the middle trailer and hook back up to make a dual
• back in between two other trailers at 30 mph and stop within 2 inches of the dock

What’s up with the flashing of lights when they pass each other going 85 mph down the Interstate? Daytime, Nighttime, Anytime.

Flash, flash, flash.

Flash headlights when a trucker pulls into their lane, flash trailer lights after pulling in front of another trucker.

Are long haul truckers stricken with Alzheimer’s when they hit the Interstate Highways so they forget how long their rig is?

Does a long haul trucker’s mirror say “objects in mirror must flash before you turn right?”

Are Interstate truckers so hopped up on bennies that they need visual assistance to get back in line?

Do they think this is NASCAR and to turn right you need a spotter to indicate “clear low?”

They all have cell phones, why don’t they just call each other? They all have GP Esses, can’t they just plot the position of every truck in 1000 yards? Kinda like the voluntary air traffic control over the Hudson River?

What is it with Interstate Truckers?