Ford has just announced the sale of part of its ownership interest in Mazda.

-dave

"The automaker will sell 20% of Mazda today, reducing its holdings to
about 13%. Mazda said that it will buy back up to a 6.9% stake for as
much as 17.9 billion yen ($186 million). Unidentified "strategic
business partners" will purchase the rest of the shares."

http://www.freep.com/article/20081119/BUSINESS01/811190372

Good news. Ford has been holding back the rotary with their short

sightedness.

Paul Lamar

No, not shortsightedness -- they knew exactly what they were doing, and didn't want the rotary to compete with their reciprosaur gas engines. They don't even want to sell Diesels, offering them a niche market, rather than as a wide-range solution.

They have an unimaginably huge vested interest in keeping people away from other technologies.  How many billion dollars have they spent on machines which are so perfectly designed to build the hundreds of parts that go into a Ford engine . . .but which are useless for any other purpose?  This is why there is so little difference between their powerplants from year to year or model to model.  They are so uniform in manufacturing that the Triton engines have a reputation for blowing spark plugs out of the cylinder head, but only ONE PARTICULAR PLUG, thousands upon thousands of them (so many that TimeSerts developed a kit specifically to fix this problem in this engine)!

It could be a labor union issue.  I dunno.  It doesn't matter.  All that counts is that the less Dearborn influence on Mazda, the closer we are to the rotary being unremarkably common.

Keith W