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How Ford's light lab keeps the sun shining on the new Mustang just right [w/video]

Anyone who's bought one of those old school metal shift knobs knows they're really cool until they sit in a parking lot in the sun for a few hours. Then they're not cool at all. Likewise, features such as the aluminum dash on the 2015 Ford Mustang can be all kinds of neat right up until the sun hits it just the right way and sends shards of blinding light through the cabin. The Ford Visual Performance and Evaluation Lab is where engineers figure out how to make sure that doesn't happen.
Cars like said Mustang are parked inside the 30-foot reflecting dome under 6,000 watts of lights that can mimic the sun at any time of day and in any weather condition. Engineers can then spend cold, overcast days inside, testing for interior legibility, glare and reflections on every interior and exterior surface as if it were bright and sunny. They can also learn how a car's sheetmetal and colors will look out of doors, all year round.
Ford showed off the lighting lab without the music and interviews three years ago when the Explorer was being prepared. You can watch it at work again in the video below, and read about it in the press release below that.

Ford paying $750 million just to close plant in Belgium

According to a report from Reuters, Ford is shelling out $750 million in a severance deal that will see the automaker close its facility in Genk, Belgium. The automaker reached this deal with the 4,000 hourly workers employed at the plant last week, which means the company will pay out an average of $187,500 per worker.
Ford is still negotiating with the 300 salaried workers at the factory, which currently produces the Mondeo sedan. All told, Ford expects to lose around $2 billion in Europe thanks in no small part to the region's ongoing economic downturn, and two more plants are scheduled to be shut down in Europe this year. The company will log its $750 million payout under "special items" for this quarter.
As you may recall, Ford took a similar path in the US back in 2009 when the domestic market took a spill. Back then, the company shelled out around $50,000 per employee with at least one year of experience, plus either $25,000 toward a new car or an extra cash payment of $20,000. It would seem the cost of closing plants in Belgium is a much harder pill to swallow than in the States...

2021 Ford F-150 Raptor vs. 2021 Ram 1500 TRX | How they compare on paper

Yep, the F-150 Raptor is back, though you'd be forgiven for not noticing that it ever left. Ford's off-road model is taking a few months off to accommodate the broader 2021 F-150 redesign from which it benefits. And the fine folks over at Ram took full advantage of that lull to launch the new 702-horsepower TRX, which in one big way (hint: it's the engine) stands at the top of the performance pickup heap. Ford says that's all going to change in 2022, but for now, the Raptor returns with a familiar 3.5-liter EcoBoost V6 (albeit with an unspecified power figure) along with several other revisions to Ford's tried-and-true formula. The 2020 Raptor was already a worthy adversary to the beefy Ram despite the latter's definitive power advantage, so how has that picture evolved for 2021? Let's take a look.    Powertrain This is a big question mark for the Ford right now, but it seems reasonable to expect a bit more than the outgoing model's 450 horsepower and 510 pound-feet of torque. The TRX's Hellcat-sourced powerplant needs no introduction. Its 702 horsepower will easily eclipse whatever Ford has planned for its 3.5-liter twin-turbo V6, even if the V6 has more grunt than it did before, but that's OK. It's not the base-model Raptor's job to dethrone the TRX in straight-line speed; that honor will go to the 2022 Raptor R. We also don't know what the Raptor's fuel economy will be like, but we suspect it will be better than the TRX's, if only slightly.  Both these trucks come with four-wheel-drive standard, and they both have a number of drive modes that alter the powertrain’s characteristics depending on the terrain. Baja mode transforms the trucks into the desert runners that they both are at heart, but theyÂ’re plenty capable of crawling around rocks, too. We wonÂ’t know for certain which is best at specific tasks until we can get them both on (or off) equal ground. Suspension / off-roading capability And the ground is where things narrow significantly, both on- and off-paper. The specs are freakishly similar when we compare ground clearance, approach/departure angles and water fording, but the Raptor's leapfrog here is clearly evident. Both trucks utilize a coil-sprung rear suspension now, with Ford having abandoned the Raptor's previous leaf-spring setup with the redesign.  The two use different shocks to handle 100-mph-plus desert running.