Ford's layoff payoff plan: A year to look

by Mark Silva and updated

Here's a guarantee for you..

It turned our heads, for sure, when Hyundai started advertising a new offer: Buy a Hyundai, and if you lose your job, you can return the car, no questions asked.

Now the heads are spinning: Ford Motor Co. said today that it will offer a "payment protection plan'' to lure car-buyers worried about losing their paychecks.

Ford wll cover payments of up to $700 a month, for up to a year, on any new Ford, Lincoln or Mercury if the buyer loses his or her job.

The offer only runs until June 1.

Not to be outdone, General Motors announced hours later a "GM Total Confidence package'' for new vehicles purchased during April. It includes company coverage of up to nine auto loan payments of up to $500 each if owners of new GM vehicles lose their jobs within the first 24 months of the loan.

We've heard of layover plans. But layoff plans?

Buy now, Ford and GM are telling anxious consumers, in a bid to rev up the stalled automaker. The only hitch is: If the economy turns around, you have to pay for the thing.

This, it appears, is the sort of enterprising thinking that comes from a car company that resisted the lure of federal bailout funds. The White House, which has lent billions of dollars to General Motors and Chrysler and demanded overhauls of the automakers' business models, had nothing to do with this plan. The best GM could come up with until Ford offered its layoff package was ditching the Saturn -- Chrysler, the PT Cruiser -- and GM's CEO lost his job.

Hyundai's layoff-return policy, it appears, has helped curb the decline in the South Korean carmaker's U.S. sales.

"Consumers remain anxious about the economy and their own outlook for the future," Ken Czubay, Ford vice president of sales and marketing, explains in a statement.

Have you driven jobless in a Ford lately?