Post by Kasey Kagawa

There’s a fine balance to be struck in any dating relationship. One the one hand, half the reason to get into a dating relationship is physical intimacy, after all, one-night-stands are getting more and more expensive these days, what with alimony and STD drugs becoming more pricey, and you can’t just go around propositioning random people for sexual favors unless your name is attached to least three major motion pictures or you’re a member of Congress. On the other, if you’re looking for something serious, you don’t want to wind up with someone with the emotional depth of a ashtray, the manners of a bus full of 7 year-old children off their Ritalin, and is a card-carrying member of the “Love ‘Em and Leave ‘Em” school of dating. Men have a slightly easier time looking for a deep and meaningful relationship, as most women are willing to take a go at finding a soul mate if she thinks you’re for her, but women have a harder time of it, as most men under the age of 150 are more interested in your cup size than whether or not you’re meant to be together. Most importantly, men have figured out that women like to believe that their man is interested in more than just doinking her in a public place, and have learned to pretend to care about such things as curtains and romance films in order to unlock the gates to paradise.

This has lead to something of a problem for women. See, now that men have developed sophisticated cloaking devices for our lechery, they have had to come up with ways of circumventing our defenses to see if they netted Hugh Grant or Kevin Federline. One of the more common methods is to simply withhold sex for weeks or maybe even months, to try to wait the man out to see if he’s willing to slog through the desert in order to reach the oasis. Some particularly sadistic ones even provide something of a tease through routine in-depth make out sessions or a certain amount of nudity, just to put even more pressure on the man’s self-control. The problem with it is that unless one nails it, they’re likely to drive away every man they come across.

This is precisely what Ford has done at their “Showroom of the Future” presentation on Tuesday. Inviting automotive journalists down to see the future of the Ford Motor Company’s lineup is a great idea, but then putting all of them under a non-disclosure agreement is a spectacularly bad move. Ford PR drones have said that the event was to show the journalist community and their stockholders that Ford has everything under control and is poised to launch a series of cars that will be so popular that it will put FoMoCo on solid financial footing into the next century.

The problem with that idea is that the journalist community and their stockholders aren’t the ones they need to impress in order to start clawing it back from the threat of bankruptcy. It’s the American public that need convincing, and holding some sort of double-top-secret meeting and making all those who attended sign a oath of silence in blood isn’t a good way to get the word out that Ford’s on the mend. They don’t need to give away the whole shop, either. I understand keeping the engineering facts and accounting information under wraps, but what’s the harm in showing us some photos of their Products of the Future? If they’re so worried about being perceived as hopelessly behind the times, wouldn’t it behoove them to get the word out as wide as possible that they’ve got an exciting, modern and dynamic lineup coming soon instead of hiding it under a basket? Even the journalists they hosted haven’t sounded that impressed. All the car news websites that I’ve seen that had a presence at the showcase have come away with guarded responses, having seen far too many concepts watered down and much needed models get lost in the preproduction process. It’s even worse for those of us who weren’t there, as we’re forced to swallow the idea that Ford has a mind-blowing set of cars waiting in the wings, despite the fact that they won’t tell us what those cars are or show us what they look like.

I see what they tried to do. A good deal of the negativity in the media these days is created by the perception that Ford doesn’t care about the small car market, what with the distinct absence of a car in the new supermini segment created by the Honda Fit and the Toyota Yaris and the withholding of the C1 Focus from the US market, something that this event was supposed to combat. But how on Earth are they supposed to get the word out if Ford then puts them under gag order? A noble effort then, but hampered by the same kind of corporate bureaucratic thinking that landed Ford in their current situation. If they truly wanted to make some Bold Moves, they should have let them talk about the models that were shown instead of teasing us and then making us wait a year for our big reward. And I don’t care how great will be when they finally relent and let us in, I doubt that they’re going to be worth the wait.