DETROIT – With U.S. sales continuing to decline, a top Ford Motor Co. executive said he expects to see more Ford, Lincoln and Mercury dealers willing to consolidate with others, speeding up plans to thin their ranks nationwide.

The automaker outlined its forecasts and product lineups for the Lincoln-Mercury dealership council this week so dealers have the best information possible before making decisions, said Ken Czubay, the new vice president of sales and marketing for the domestic brands.

“The industry forces have been bearing down on the entire industry dealer network,” he said. “Frankly in the last four or five months it's been very challenging to our dealers.”

But the company has no target for reducing the number of outlets, Czubay said Wednesday.

“If there was a pace, there is no plan to be at two times the pace or three times the pace,” he said.

Ford had just over 4,000 Ford, Lincoln and Mercury dealers at the end of 2007, and on average they sold about 590 vehicles during the year. In comparison, Toyota Motor Corp. had 1,400 U.S. dealerships last year, and the average Toyota dealer sold 1,766 vehicles last year, according to J.D. Power and Associates and the trade publication Automotive News.

Higher sales are important because automakers want their dealers to be profitable so they have more money to invest in facilities and will serve customers better. Most dealers are franchises and independent of Ford, which does not have much leverage on them.

Ford embarked on a dealership consolidation effort in late 2005 and has at times used financial incentives. But the effort, mainly prodding struggling dealers to merge with stronger ones nearby, has thinned the ranks by only 400 or so.

Ford's U.S. sales have been dropping in recent years and are down 14 percent so far this year, and they are no longer high enough to sustain such a large number of dealers, according to industry analysts.

Czubay said he would like to bring the average number of sales per dealership higher, but he would not give a target number.

Dealer Council Chairman Mike Adamson, who runs a Lincoln-Mercury dealership in Rochester, Minn., says the consolidation should be good for dealers, but shouldn't hurt consumers because there's so much price competition on the Internet and elsewhere.

“At some point you're in competition with your fellow dealers,” Adamson said in a telephone interview. “Look at some of the other manufacturers that have quite a lot less number of dealers. It's going to make us stronger.”

Ford won't give a target number of dealers it would like to see go, but the company is looking across the country rather than focusing on metro areas like it did in the past.

At the end of last year, Ford had 454 Lincoln-Mercury dealers, 860 Ford-Lincoln-Mercury outlets, 583 selling Ford and Mercury, and 2,159 selling only Fords.

In July, Ford reaffirmed support for the Mercury brand, which had languished with few new models in recent years. The company said Mercury would stay and would focus on more fuel-efficient vehicles.

Adamson said dealers were happy with the reassurance.

“The uncertainty that was there is gone now,” he said. “Now we can look to the future. Everything that was playing against us now is going for us.”

Ford showed off new models and engines, including a new four-cylinder, turbocharged engine that performed like it had a much larger V-6, Adamson said.

Company executives said a new Mercury compact car would have compact exterior dimensions but best-in-class interior room and fuel economy, Adamson said.

All Detroit automakers are trying to thin their dealer ranks as they continue to lose market share to foreign nameplates.

In 1984 the Detroit Three sold 77.4 percent of all cars and trucks in the U.S., but that dropped to just 51.1 percent last year, according to Autodata Corp.

During that time, the dealer network contracted only a little, so stores began to scrap with nearby dealers selling their own brands – especially those in cities and interior suburbs.

Because of declining market share, many Detroit Three dealers are losing money. Last year, 28.6 percent of Chrysler, Ford and GM dealers broke even or lost money, according to the National Automobile Dealers Association. The compares with only 14.5 percent of foreign-car dealers.