Every morning, just after getting coffee, Mark Fields fires up his laptop to pore over a computer model showing real-time U.S. auto sales figures, according to AP. On this morning in the middle of May, the man who heads Ford Motor Co.'s Americas operations has seen enough. The line on a chart showing subcompact car sales for the first two weeks of the month goes almost straight up. The one for pickup trucks, Ford's biggest profit center, runs almost straight down. High gasoline prices and the economic downturn are changing the market far faster than anyone anticipated. Without action, Ford would be making too many trucks and not enough cars, a recipe for a balance sheet peppered with parentheses. «This is going on 10 weeks where we're seeing this not get any better,» Fields recalled in a recent interview. «So we'd better act, and we'd better act now.» At General Motors Corp., they were reaching the same conclusions. Consumers were delaying big-ticket purchases. Those who bought weren't going for GM or Ford trucks and sport utility vehicles, instead snapping up just about anything that gets more than 30 miles per gallon.
