Alan Mulally, president and CEO of Ford Motor Co. (NYSE: F), said Wednesday that he expects U.S. auto sales to rise during the next two years. Vehicle sales in 2009 are expected to range between 10.5 million and 11 million units, and Mulally predicts that number will increase to 12.5 million in 2010 and 14.5 million in 2011.

"It has started to pick up right now because we have had the stimulus packages," said Mulally, speaking before reporters in India. "So, it will be up a little now, then will go down. But overall in the long term, the sales will grow with the GDP number." The CEO added that Ford expects to be profitable by 2011.

The domestic automakers have all but given up and declared bankruptcy in an effort to survive in some form. Chrysler is about through its process, and GM is well on its way to becoming a completely new company. The standout: Ford Motor Co. (NYSE: F).

Ford is not only doing much better than the competition (and has been for a few years now), but it's actually increasing auto production while the bankrupt competitors are having a hard time getting rid of old inventory and shutting down dealers.

Ford Motor Company (NYSE: F) now stands alone as the sole American automotive company out of the "big three" that has not filed for bankruptcy. Ford CEO Alan Mulally made moves starting years ago to ensure Ford would dig itself out of many legacy problems, and it paid off. I even chided the man's salary when he was hired. Was he worth it? Sure.

Ford Motor Co. (NYSE: F) CEO Alan Mulally indicated this week that he will bow to a 30% pay cut in 2009 while the troubled automaker's salaried workers will forgo all bonuses. Not only that, but the UAW approved buyout concessions targeted for a March 9 strike date for other workers. Although Ford has not yet taken federal buyout funds like other Detroit automakers, the company still has massive financial hurdles to overcome.

Ford Motor (NYSE: F) recently indicated that it doesn't anticipate needing federal bailout money. The automaker is in the same heap of trouble as its competitors, but has handled costs and other infrastructure items better with CEO Alan Mulally at the wheel in recent years.

But everything may come to a pass later this year, according to Barclays' analyst Brian Johnson. Johnson indicated that even Ford will need to tap the federal spigot at some point. That is, unless a miraculous revival in new auto sales happens...starting yesterday. Johnson even cut his price on Ford shares to $1 from the previous $4 mark. That's bed sentiment I think -- right?

Ford Motor Co. (NYSE: F) is scheduled to release fourth-quarter and full-year 2008 results tomorrow morning, January 29, before the market opens. Alan Mulally, president and chief executive officer, and Lewis Booth, executive vice president and chief financial officer, will discuss the results and company outlook in a conference call at 9:00 AM ET. You can catch the live webcast of the call at the company's website.

For the quarter that saw a new CFO for Ford and visits to Congress to discuss a possible bailout, analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters expect Ford to report that its net loss deepened to $1.19 per share, from $0.20 a year ago. Revenue for the quarter is expected to total $26.3 billion, which is 42.3% lower than a year ago. Ford's losses were deeper than expected in the past two quarters, which followed a surprise profit in the first quarter of 2008.

Ford (NYSE: F) management continues to be a little rash by saying it will not require government bailout money. It does have the strongest balance sheet of the Big Three and holds the most cash.

According to Reuters, "Ford Motor Co. has enough liquidity to fund its restructuring plan and despite the deep downturn in auto sales still sees no need to ask for government loans, Chief Executive Alan Mulally said."

Ford is making the mistake of creating a plan based on what it can control and refusing to admit the the most important element of an improved U.S. car market is beyond the power of management decisions.

Ford has proved adroit at cutting costs and may be able to get its expenses down to a point where its North American operations can break even if total U.S. vehicles sales in 2009 are 11 million or 12 million units. But, what if the recession bites harder and that figure moves to 10 million or below? Every million vehicle sales counts for about $25 billion. Expense reduction at America's car companies may not be able to make up for that level of devastation in demand.

The Big 3 CEOs are trying to turn lemons into lemonade.

After being pilloried by members of Congress for flying in separate corporate jets to beg for a $25 billion bailout from the federal government, Rick Wagoner of General Motors Co. (NYSE: GM), Ford Motor Co.'s (NYSE: F) Alan Mulally and Robert Nardelli of Chrysler LLC want to show that they have learned their lesson. They decided to drive eight hours from Detroit to Washington before testifying on Thursday.

Moreover, they are milking their roadtrip for public relations purposes. Wagoner is traveling via Chevrolet Malibu hybrid and Mulally is driving a hybrid Ford Escape. Nardelli has not finalized his plans yet but as BusinessWeek notes "he's not flying a corporate jet. That's for sure." I would be stunned if he does not motor to the nation's capital in a Chrysler hybrid.

This whole exercise is silly, but it has a serious purpose. The negative publicity from the corporate jet story cost the Big 3 critical support for the bailout. Some analysts are suggesting that GM and Chrysler may not be able to wait for the Obama administration to take over next month. Ford can hold on a while longer.

When the CEOs of General Motors Corp. (NYSE: GM), Ford Motor Company (NYSE: F) and Chrysler again take the steps up to the U.S Congress tomorrow, they will again try to convince U.S. lawmakers that a $25 billion injection into all three companies will somehow stave off their collective death along with over a million U.S. jobs that would be lost if the three automakers cease to exist.

GM's Rick Wagoner, Ford's Alan Mulally and Chrysler's Bob Nardelli -- all of whom flew to the last meeting with Congress on expensive private jets -- will be back in action tomorrow to try for the second time to siphon $25 billion from the federal government. Oops, I mean, the U.S. taxpayer. A few weeks ago, the trio were labeled as unprepared and failed to convince the majority of Congress that $25 billion would allow all three companies to somehow retool their complete efforts pretty fast.

If Wagoner, Mulally and Nardelli can't make their vision compelling with facts, future plans, some kind of competitive strategy and a five-year layout on changes they will make, along with being held accountable to each of them, then the end of the American auto manufacturing triumvirate as we all know it may be the end.

Of course, like many pundits, I sincerely believe that this is all for show and that a structured bankruptcy is the "way out" for at least Ford and GM at this point.

Speaking of leaders, Ford's Mulally -- who has shown some excellent chops at trying to rescue Ford in his two plus years there -- may be the only CEO that needs to stay. Wagoner needs to go (actually, years ago), and why on earth Chrysler nabbed Home Depot shenanigan master Nardelli is beyond comprehension.

So where do the CEOs of General Motors (NYSE: GM), Ford (NYSE: F) and Chrysler go when they need to turn their companies around? Are they huddled in their boardrooms in Detroit, planning sales strategies with top executives? Are they cracking the whip in their design studios as they seek to build the perfect car?

Nah. They go where every other corporate bigwig goes when there's trouble afoot: Washington, D.C., home to the world's most dependable source of capital -- the U.S. Treasury.

This week, Rick Wagoner of GM, Alan Mulally of Ford and Bob Nardelli of Chrysler are testifying before Congress as they go fishing for $25 billion in funding to help develop more fuel efficient cars. Now that the SUV craze is over and Detroit has consumed the hundreds of millions in fat profits those trucks produced, the car companies find that they failed to save for a rainy day.

It's more than a little ironic that the one-time powerhouses of the American economy are begging the federal government for help. Major corporations have spent the last 40 years fighting government involvement in the economy -- the Big Three fought government rules requiring seat belts, for goodness sake. And GM played a major role in defeating national health insurance decades ago, among many other sins committed in the name of maintaining the glorious free market. But when they hit a wall, the corporate powers know just where to go -- and it's certainly not to the free market. No, Uncle Sam is a far more reliable source, especially in hard times. So much for free market capitalism.

The only problem is, with the bailout of AIG among others, Detroit may not like its place at the end of the state capital line. And the Big Three had better hope that voters don't start wondering why the government is spending the limited capital of the American people on an industry that is currently dedicated to lowering the wages and eliminating the benefits of its workers.

I certainly don't want to see large American companies go out of business. I just hope that they repay the generosity of the tax-payers with something other than low wages and canceled pensions.

UPDATE: In response to a question in the comments about GM's role in opposing national health insurance, you can start reading about that shameful history in a New Yorker piece by Malcolm Gladwell. Here's an excerpt:

In 1945, when President Truman first proposed national health insurance, they [union leaders] cheered. In 1947, when Ford offered its workers a pension, the union voted it down. The labor movement believed that the safest and most efficient way to provide insurance against ill health or old age was to spread the costs and risks of benefits over the biggest and most diverse group possible. Walter Reuther [the national president of the U.A.W at the time]...believed that risk ought to be broadly collectivized. Charlie Wilson [president of G.M.], on the other hand, felt the way the business leaders of Toledo did: that collectivization was a threat to the free market and to the autonomy of business owners. In his view, companies themselves ought to assume the risks of providing insurance.

If that's too 'liberal media' for you and you need something more academic, try For All These Rights: Business, Labor, and the Shaping of America's Public-Private Welfare State (Princeton, 2003) by Jennifer Klein, a labor historian at Yale. Please send your revised analysis to me after you do a little reading . . .

Ford Motor Co. (NYSE: F) will refit an existing truck plant in Michigan to manufacture smaller cars. Cost: $75 million. This comes on the heels of one of the worst years ever for large American automakers, which still can't cope with rapidly changing consumer desires for fuel-efficient transportation instead of gas guzzling SUVs and large trucks.

As Georges indicated recently, Ford will need massive plant retooling to get its bottom line back in shape as it produces the product mix consumers are looking for. This is a good step for Ford, even though it will be costly. The $75 million price is minor considering the cost of doing nothing.

Ford says the production of newer, fuel-efficient cars at the Michigan plant will begin in a few months, with completion sometime in 2010. It's also moving 1,000 of the employees from that plant to another one in Wayne, Michigan to increase production of the 4-cylinder Ford Focus sedan. Since Ford spent $300 million just three years ago to build the plant to be flexible, this should speed the conversion, according to the automaker.

It's just too bad that Ford can't unveil more small car production in November instead of just starting to convert a plant for a few years down the road.

General Motors (NYSE: GM) and Ford (NYSE: F) want you to pick up their tab for their decades of excess and managerial incompetence.

The Associated Press reports that the Detroit automakers are likely to ask Congress for $50 billion in low-interest loans to fund modernization efforts, and help them build more fuel-efficient vehicles.

What a load of crap. In 2007, Ford paid cash-burning CEO Alan Mulally $21 million, and GM's Richard Wagoner got a 41% raise to over $14 million for the same year. In effect, our tax dollars will be subsidizing this pay for pulse orgy of bad governance. GM also paid out more than half a billion in dividends in 2007 -- if the company needs billions to invest in modernization, why didn't it cut the dividend a long time ago?

It appears that the auto industry has been counting on a bailout all along, and why not? It looks like they'll be getting it.

As expected, Ford Motor Co. (NYSE: F) posted dreadful results. But the numbers were even more awful than Wall Street feared, sending shares of the company plunging in premarket action.

The number three automaker -- at least for now --- posted a net loss of $8.7 billion, or $3.88 a share, for the second quarter including a $5.3 billion write down of its North American auto business and another $2.1 billion charge. A year earlier, Ford had a net profit of $750 million, or 31 cents per share. Revenue excluding special items fell to $38.6 billion compared with $44.2 billion during the year earlier period.

Excluding one-time expenses, the loss was $1.38 billion, or 62 cents. On that basis, analysts had expected a loss of 27 cents on revenue of $34.6 billion, according to Thomson Reuters.

The Wall Street Journal was good enough to humiliate General Motors (NYSE: GM) CEO Rick Wagoner by pointing out that he still has his job. The company's share price is down almost 85% since he took over. The newspaper writes that Mr. "Wagoner's decision a few years ago to tilt GM's product mix more toward trucks and SUVs isn't looking good."

Fair enough. But there are two critical elements to Wagoner still having his corner office. One is that the rest of the US car industry is as bad off as GM, maybe worse. The other is that no CEO in his right mind would leave a good job to take over GM. Boeing (NYSE: BA) exec, Alan Mulally, moved to Ford (NYSE: F) as the head man and he must regret the decision every day.

Wagoner is part of the "dumbing down" of the American CEO. If the man can't do well, blame it on the industry. That makes it seem that individual companies are powerless to make decisions that will put them ahead of the competition, even in tough markets.

Tell that to the guys at Honda (NYSE: HMC).

Douglas A. McIntyre is an editor at 247wallst.com.

"Ford Motor Co. (NYSE: F) recently surprised Wall Street by posting its first profit in ages," notes Mark Skousen in The Turnaround Trader. Here's the advisor's bullish outlook on the auto maker.

"Ford announced a $100 million profit in the quarter, even though sales lagged General Motors and Toyota. I see Ford as a deeply undervalued company that finally is producing good quality cars, both here and abroad, and I don't think higher gasoline prices will have much effect on the turnaround.

"Ford must be seen as a global producer. And foreign sales are booming for Ford and GM. Moreover, now that Ford has decided to include Microsoft's Nuance-powered Sync voice control system in some of its 2008 models, it could help improve sales dramatically here in U.S. showrooms.

"If the profitable quarter continues, Ford now is selling for only 14 times next year's earnings. With revenues of close to $40 billion in the quarter, a smart business person certainly could cut the fat from that and turn a profit, and that is exactly what turnaround specialist CEO Alan Mulally is doing.

"Under his guidance, Ford saved $1.7 billion from cost reductions in the quarter and agreed to sell Jaguar and Land Rover. Wall Street likes what Mulally is doing, and so does billionaire investor Kirk Kerkorian, who is buying its stock. Let's join him by buying Ford."

Each day, Steven Halpern's TheStockAdvisors.com offers the latest market commentary and favorite investment ideas from the nation's leading financial newsletter advisors.

There's also the bearish case: Ford (F): No short seller faith in turnaround