FRANKFURT (Reuters) -- Ford CEO Bill Ford Jr is prepared to let someone else lead the carmaker his great-grandfather founded should the right manager be available, he said in a magazine interview.

The auto maker's CEO told employees that the company needs a new business model and is considering turning to outside executives and making alliances with other carmakers.

"I'm always looking to bring talent into this company. If I can find somebody - I thought Carlos (Ghosn) was an exceptionally talented executive who could help the company - I'll go get him. That is regardless of the position," Ford told Newsweek in an interview posted on the magazine's website.

Asked if that applied to his own job as well, Ford replied: "Absolutely."

Ford was referring to past efforts to lure Ghosn, who is chief executive of alliance partners Renault of France and Nissan of Japan, to work for the number two U.S. carmaker, which is struggling to handle losses in North America.

Renault and Nissan are in talks with General Motors (Charts) now about joining forces in a three-way alliance. They have set a deadline of mid-October to decide whether to proceed.

Asked why he had approached Ghosn about forming an alliance with Ford, Bill Ford said: "I talk to Carlos all the time, but I'm not going to comment on that."

Media reports have said Ford called Ghosn to discuss an alliance should the GM talks fail.

Bill Ford said his top priority was guiding Ford back to profit in North America - where high fuel prices have crimped demand for Ford's sport utility vehicles and light trucks - and not to recruit a new CEO.

"I'm not looking to replace myself. I'm looking to make sure the company is stocked with talent. But look, right now I'm focused on getting the North American operations back on track. That's where my energy and time is going. That's my passion."

He said he would always be part of the company given family ties. The Ford family has 40 percent of the voting rights.

The auto maker's CEO told employees that the company needs a new business model and is considering turning to outside executives and making alliances with other carmakers, according to a Financial Times report on Sunday citing a memo it said was sent to staff.

The FT said on its Web site that in the memo, sent to Ford employees ahead of a turnaround plan to be unveiled later this month, Bill Ford said: "The business model that sustained us for decades is no longer sufficient to sustain profitability."

On Thursday, Ford said it wanted to sell its Aston Martin luxury unit to free up funds to invest in its other brands amid a sharp downturn in sales.

Shares of Ford (Charts) closed Friday at $8.27 on the New York Stock Exchange.

They Used To Be Contenders

The idea for this column started when I heard complaints that people were not buying Ford Explorers because they did not like the door handles. I looked at the door handles. To me, they are fine, yet I realized that one could understand the disarray at Ford Motor by looking at the sales collapse of four vehicles, each of which had been a best seller or a close competitor in its class. Let us go back to 1996 to see how it all began to fall apart.

In 1996, the Ford (nyse: F - news - people ) Taurus sedan and wagon accounted for over half a million sales, including sales of its slower-selling sister vehicle, the Mercury Sable. Soon, the Taurus will be at zero. When you can run volume from 515,213 to zero, that is just dumbness, as is creating two totally different vehicles in a tightening market for family sedans, which is what Ford did in replacing the Taurus with the larger Ford 500 and the smaller Fusion.

In 1996, Ford sold 288,393 units of its Ford Ranger small pickup truck. This year, Ford will be lucky to sell 98,000 units of this ancient model. At one time, Ranger kept two factories humming. Now, Ford is going to close the remaining Ranger plant and will not say what comes next for this nameplate. Toyota Motor's (nyse: TM - news - people ) Tundra is blowing away a one-time Ford best seller. That is ineptness.

The market for small pickups has declined, but that is not a good excuse. With consumers becoming more conscious of fuel economy, it is frightening for a big company like Ford not to have a competitive entry--now or in the near future--in this segment.

Small cars are another key market where Ford took its eye off the road. Ford had been the small-car king since the Model T. In 1996, the company sold 232,441 Ford Escorts and Mercury Tracers. It looks like the Ford division will sell 190,000 copies of the Focus (the successor to the Escort) this year, while the Mercury group has been without a small-car entry for years. Honda Motor (nyse: HMC - news - people ), Toyota and Chevrolet models all outsell Focus. One key reason for the decline is that Ford has not kept the Focus up to date.

The fourth Ford model, the Explorer sport utility vehicle, is different. Changes in the market, more than inept management, have hurt Ford Explorer sales. Just a few years ago, Ford was selling more than 500,000 units a year, counting sales of its sister models from Mercury and Lincoln, and Canadian and Mexican sales. At that time, this model was the best-selling SUV in the world, with two factories running at full capacity. At its peak, Explorer generated operating profits of $6,000 to $8,000 a unit, which works out to $3 billion to $4 billion.

The Explorer was a terrific SUV--still is, even "recommended" by Consumer Reports magazine.

Through the first seven months of this year, Ford sold 132,500 Explorers and related models, versus 200,000 during the same time last year. Ford is likely to sell only 225,000 of these vehicles for all of this year--less that half the volume in peak years.

What went wrong?

Explorer's problems started with the Firestone tire firestorm in 2000. Under-inflated tires peeled, leading to rollovers, mostly in hot-weather states such as Texas and Florida. The negative publicity was enormous. Some think this killed the nameplate, and that Ford, at the least, should have renamed the Explorer, but this is hard to prove. In fact, total Explorer sales stayed high, above 450,000, until two years ago.

More important was that competition grew. GM's (nyse: GM - news - people ) Chevrolet Blazer and its offshoots were weak entries, but the Chevy Trailblazer, which GM rolled out in the 2001 model year, was a much-improved vehicle. Everyone else added new SUV models, and newer forms, like the "crossovers" that were built on a car chassis rather than truck frames like the Explorer. Crossovers like the Honda Pilot and Toyota Highlander in particular, are taking sales away from vehicles like Explorer. The increasing price of gasoline also hurt sales of the bigger SUVs.

Then there are those door handle complaints. Ford acknowledges that some folks had initial difficulty finding the relocated handles. The company is moving the handles again on the 2007 models to deal with this, but as noted, I did not have a problem.

I think that Ford made several mistakes with the Explorer. It redesigned the vehicle several times over the past decade and made big improvements to the underlying platform, but it did not do enough to distinguish the new models from the older versions.

Marketing is another area where Ford falls short. Two years ago, the company made stability control standard in all Explorers. This feature cured--as much as possible--the rollover issue with the Explorer, and it became the first high-volume SUV to have this safety system as standard. The problem is that Ford did a terrible job of communicating this news to the public. Frankly, in half a century of watching this company, I have never seen such weak marketing.

In three of these Ford vehicles, the failures seem to be the fault of the company's executives. But with Explorer, changes in the market are the key problem. Smarter decision-making might have helped, but people have turned to lighter, less-thirsty SUVs. Nevertheless, it is obvious that in the case of the Taurus, Ranger and Focus, Ford Motor executives were asleep at the wheel.