Two-year breath of fresh air for St. Paul plant

Flex fuel the Ranger -- again! The Rangers made in Saint Paul used to be flex fuel, but they stopped that a few years ago. Bad move. This is the heart of E85 country. In Ford's tumbling financial fortunes proved improbably good news for the 1,060 people who still turn out Ranger pickups at the company's St. Paul assembly plant. On Thursday, the same day that it reported a whopping quarterly loss of $8.7 billion, Ford Motor Co. announced that it would delay closure of the plant by two years, until 2011. To believe that the plant will survive beyond this latest forecast requires trust that the U.S. economy will turn from to cold to hot, that pioneering technology will move from promise to reality and that a near-bankrupt automobile company will come up with hundreds of millions of new investment dollars. But, for the moment,... [read full story]