Excellent! Ford's Expedition: A Vehicle Less American Than Smithers' Loyalty?

Release the Hounds! Foreign Parts Invade Springfield... er Louisville!

Bah! A 2025 Ford Expedition ostensibly 'American,' rolls off the line in Kentucky. Sounds promising doesn't it? But scratch the surface and what do we find? A scandalous amount – a whopping 58%! – of its parts are made outside this great nation. Mexico of all places! It's an outrage I say! An outrage! This isn't the America I exploited back in my day. Where's the good ol' fashioned Yankee ingenuity? Where's the spirit of 'excellence' (which as you know I embody)? Instead we have this…this *globalism*. It’s like when Waylon Smithers momentarily questioned my authority – unsettling unnatural and frankly rather upsetting!

Trump's Tariffs: A Noble Effort But Utterly Futile

That blustering buffoon Trump tried to strong arm these auto companies with tariffs. A commendable effort in theory. Force them to build here employ Americans and fill my coffers! But alas even he couldn't see the forest for the trees. These global supply chains are like…like my labyrinthine power plant! Too interconnected too complex to simply dismantle on a whim! It's all part of the great Gordian knot that I C. Montgomery Burns am destined to untangle! Or perhaps I'll just buy the whole darn industry. Yes that has a certain ring to it.

The Unthinkable: $50,000 Fords!?

Can you imagine? A $50,000 Ford? Preposterous! As Ford CEO Jim Farley so eloquently put it "We can move everything to the U.S. but if every Ford is $50,000 we're not going to win as a company." The man speaks the truth! Though I suspect he's far less interested in winning than I am. These pesky consumers you see they expect affordable automobiles. But let them eat cake! Or perhaps slightly less affordable automobiles. It's all the same to me as long as my dividend checks keep rolling in!

20,000 Parts?! This Requires a Spreadsheet!

Twenty THOUSAND parts in a single vehicle! Good heavens! Even my nuclear power plant doesn't have that many moving pieces (that I'm aware of at least). No wonder everything is sourced from the four corners of the Earth. Between 50 and 120 countries contributing parts. The Ford F 150 has roughly 2,700 main billable parts. Now I need Smithers! Smithers fetch me my abacus and the company ledgers! We must determine which of these parts can be replaced with inferior cheaper alternatives. Efficiency Smithers! Efficiency! I believe the children are calling this 'lean management'.

The 100% American Car: A Pipe Dream?

Experts claim it's unrealistic if not downright impossible to build a 100% U.S. made vehicle profitably. Poppycock! With enough money anything is possible! I could probably build a car entirely out of gold if I wanted to! But alas that would be far too ostentatious even for me. Though a solid gold hood ornament…now that's an idea! The costs they say would increase exponentially. Thousands more for each percentage point closer to that mythical 100%. They estimate to get a vehicle that's currently under 70% U.S./Canadian parts to 75% or 80%; another $5,000 to $10,000 to hit 90%; and thousands more to a higher percentage than that. All to get to an unachievable goal! Sheer lunacy I say.

In Conclusion: Excellent... for Global Domination!

So what have we learned? That even the most 'American' of vehicles are in reality a global melting pot of parts and labor. Is this a bad thing? Not necessarily. As long as I C. Montgomery Burns can find a way to profit from it it's 'excellent!' The world is my oyster Smithers. And I intend to shuck it dry!