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1:04pm -- "new products" are helping Ford's cause to returning to profitability. The reason? Smaller car sales and smaller crossover sales. In other words, Ford's move to gas-efficient vehicles to feed customer demand is showing fruit. That's good. Large cars like the Expedition are flat as far as sales go.

1:06pm -- retail sales for Ford were off 17% in April, which was a pretty stiff decline indeed. What happened? That's a huge drop from the year-ago April month, even after Ford's Q1 results showed a less-than-expected loss. Odd.

1:10pm -- Ford execs are now going over how the personal income, housing and consumer confidence possibly affected Ford's April results. Gas prices (of course) are being mentioned and the backdrop of Ford's results for April being affected from the year-ago April month.

1:13pm -- the disclaimers and overview ends, and the Q&A starts, with analyst questions first.

1:15pm -- first question: what happened with the F-Series truck sales in April (showed little to no declines) Answer: Ford's Q1 period showed the F-Series being responsible for "softness" in the retail market. Part of the F-Series being flat in the April period is hard to compare to Q1 (well, duh), and the Super Duty line is increasing to the tune of the customary 40% of all F-Series sales.

1:18pm -- second question: how did sales come in weekly throughout April? What was the "cadence of sales" (colorful language here). Answer: pretty weak "cadence" throughout the month, until the end of the month (when incentives ramp). Although, incentives were pretty weak for April compared to the year-ago April month.

1:22pm -- third question: there is a new F-Series incentive package to the tune of $5,800 per unit: did Ford "re-bucket" incentives in April or actually increase incentives for the F-Series? Answer: the data of $5,800 from an outside research firm is incorrect -- the F-Series incentive is not over $5,000 per unit.

1:26pm -- next question: what is going on with the Expedition in terms of incentive activity? Answer: the Expedition is getting high marks from the industry (features and such), but the 2006 Expedition was against GM's newer product -- and the 2007 Expedition is all-new and it's getting accolades.

1:29pm -- next question: another incentive spending question: Ford is spending less on incentives -- is Ford going for price over volume? Answer: "that's the 24 trillion-dollar question"jibe comes from Ford's end. Then, the real answer comes in -- Ford values "balance" between price and volume (it's not leaning towards either one).

1:33pm -- next question: does the softness in the F-Series market happen to be due to buyers being underwater (Ford having issues getting them into newer model-year trucks, for example). Answer: We don't know (that's it!)

1:35pm -- next question before we head into the media portion of the Q&A: the Super Duty's piece of the entire F-Series category (40%) -- was this up year-over-year. Answer: 2007 Super Duty sales were up quite a bit from April 2006's 27% figure.

1:38pm -- first media question: what is going on with Lincoln (sales are down)? Answer: the Lincoln brand was up even though the MKZ model was down for April. Overall, Lincoln sales weren't affected by the slight April downturn due to the Lincoln MKZ.

1:41pm -- second media question: Explorer sales were flat for April -- what does Ford make of it? Answer: Ford is starting to get to a level that is "ongoing", although traditional SUV sales aren't "going down" in a trending pattern that will constantly continue.

1:46pm -- last media question: Fusion and Milan sales were down in April: are these declines reversible? Answer: on these two vehicles, the absolute unit volume for the entire auto industry in the segments where these two vehicles was down from March to April. In 2006, the reverse was true. Not much explanation is given on why this happened except to say that industry weakness in April dropped the ball on all the manufacturers.

1:50pm -- that's it! Ford's April results were disappointing, but several times, the reference to the entire auto industry having a bad April was made. Do you buy it?