After surprising investors with a profit when reporting the latest quarter, Ford Motor Co. (NYSE: F) now says it no longer expects to achieve its North American Automotive profitability goal for 2009.

"Rapidly rising commodity prices -- particularly steel prices -- and higher gasoline prices that are accelerating consumers' shift away from large trucks and SUVs together are having a tremendous impact on our sales, our manufacturing operations and our profitability as we look to 2009," said Mark Fields, Ford's President of The Americas.

Overall, he said, the company is expected to break even in 2009, with strong results in Europe and Asia.

"Unless there is a fairly rapid turnaround in U.S. business conditions, which we are not anticipating, it now looks like it will take longer than expected to achieve our North American Automotive profitability goal," Mulally said.

As it announced it wouldn't meet its long-held goal, Ford also said that to combat these "external forces" it would cut production through the remainder of this year of large trucks and SUVs while increasing 2008 North American production of some better selling models. Overall, though, there will be decreased production of vehicles from 16 million cars planned for 2008, to 15 to 15.4 million cars.

In a conference call, Mulally declined to comment about his meeting with Mr. Jerry York, who works for Kirk Kerkorian. Kerkorian's investment company, Tracinda, had acquired 100 million Ford shares to a stake of almost 6%, with plans to buy 20 million more. No doubt, the billionaire investor would put pressure on management at some point.

The measures taken by Ford, lowering production and mainly changing its product mix aren't surprising. In fact, I'm not sure why it has taken so long for the company and its management to see the writing on the wall: High oil prices are here to stay and people are shifting to smaller, more efficient cars, shying away from the big trucks. The action taken is important, but late.

Perhaps it is the short-sightedness of management, more than anything, that caused the big drop in Ford's share price. Ford shares fell 54 cents, or 6.92%, to $7.26 by 10:52 a.m. EDT.