If the current products aren't profitable already, how does does the company exist?

This doesn't really apply in the Ford case, but the real question is why we let companies burn money to get market share, killing existing sustanable businesses in the process? Once no competition is left, they raise prices and decrease quality, ending up with a worse product than we had before.

> Once no competition is left, they raise prices and decrease quality, ending up with a worse product than we had before.

That's the goal of literally every company. They all want to charge you as much as they can possibly get away with, while giving you as little as possible in return because it lowers their costs. Our society has decided that greed is the greatest virtue and the most important consideration in every facet of life. That inevitably results in a race to the bottom.

It’s not that we’ve decided that greed is virtuous; you’ll find critique of the rich throughout our culture. The issue, rather, is that the people with money intrinsically have so much more influence than everyone else, and the incentive to push things in a direction that’s favorable for them, eg direct lobbying and media bias. From an outside perspective, isn’t it insane that news outlets are mostly owned either by billionaires or corporations, given that these all have a shared interest in maintaining a specific economic status quo? It’s a major bug (or feature haha) in the system, and as a consequence effective change is often impossible. It’s not that there’s overt censorship, rather that there’s a constant pressure that pushes threatening ideas to the fringes, leaving only a residue of somewhat harmless social activism as a pressure release valve. I’m not sure how we get out of this; it’s a direct consequence of how the structure works that it’s hard to change.

> If the current products aren't profitable already, how does does the company exist?

It's all propped up on future potential gains, Amazon wasn't profitable for a decade, Uber just turner (barely) profitable last year.

As long as there is hope there will be money, the problem is that the hope river is starting to run dry

Innovation in the automotive industry is far from dead, this is just the greed from investors seeping through every pore of the company, trying to squeeze as much money as they can get away with.

Making maximum profits for their shareholders should not be the highest goal of corporations nowadays, if they're persons they've become sociopaths.