Ford CEO Jim Farley told Bloomberg's Matt Miller that a culture change at the Blue Oval lead to Ford becoming a "four-year ...
What James Farley said
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Ford CEO Jim Farley discussed the company's quality turnaround, attributing it to a culture change prioritizing quality over profits, with engineers and supply chain teams embedded in plants and suppliers. He highlighted the Rouge plant's data-driven quality control, including torque measurement and AI vision systems. Farley quantified the improvement as hundreds of millions of dollars in cost tailwinds from reduced warranty and recall costs, plus supplier negotiations. For Ford Pro, he noted 30-40% quarterly subscription growth, over 80% gross margins, and approaching one million subscriptions, with vehicles tested to 200,000-300,000 miles. He discussed Ford's energy storage business, targeting 20 gigawatt hours, with EDF committing about five gigawatt hours. Farley declined to preview EBIT guidance ahead of earnings but expressed optimism about June sales. On Formula 1, he confirmed Red Bull Ford's powertrain was the most powerful, and he hopes to get Max Verstappen into the Ford Hypercar at Le Mans.
Key takeaways
Ford Pro subscription growth is running 30-40% quarter over quarter with gross margins over 80%, approaching one million subscriptions.
Ford is scaling energy storage to 20 gigawatt hours, with EDF committing about five gigawatt hours over several years.
Farley declined to preview EBIT guidance but said June could be a breakthrough month for Ford sales.
Red Bull Ford's powertrain was rated the most powerful in the F1 paddock by the FIA and Formula 1.
Let's kick it off, Jim. I mean, it is such an incredible feat not only coming back from the slide that you were in to take the number one spot. Number two or number three would have been impressive, but beating Toyota, beating Honda — they're legendary for quality. How did you actually achieve that?
Well, it took us four years of hard work to be an overnight success story. You know, it's been just an amazing culture change at Ford. Literally, Matt, every one of our engineers has been in the plant. Every one of our supply chain teams are in our suppliers. We are paying attention to every detail. It has taken a few years to get there, but I think it's really about the culture of putting quality before profits, before anything else. And that really is what's exciting about this, because now what I'm seeing is the team really focusing on long-term durability.
So, what was it — your team, was it an employee, a labor issue? Was it technology? Did you use AI? Was it factory processes? Can you get into specifics of how you did it?
Yeah, if you were to visit today the Rouge plant where we make the F-150, Matt, what you would see is a whole control center around data and quality data. So, we measure the torque of every one of our fasteners. We have AI tools, vision systems, but most of all, it's just old-fashioned hard work of our team members all working together to pay attention to the very small details that will make a difference between a perfectly built Ford and an okay built Toyota. It's just an incredible attention to every single detail.
So, I mean it's interesting now that we're in the age of AI and we're talking about this technology killing jobs, but it seems like in your case, it's really experienced human workers that made the big difference.
It did. I have to say the process coaches, the area coaches, you know, they get up every morning, they look at the last shift's quality data, we look at how many vehicles are repaired, and we work that process every moment of every day. Every employee walks into any one of our plants, they know exactly are we winning or losing yesterday and today. Everyone is fully aware of where we stand. We know exactly where Toyota is, we knew exactly how to beat Tundra and Super Duty better than any of the other domestic competitors, and so everyone is aware exactly of the quality coming out of our plant and any particular shift every 50 seconds. And that human motivation to pay attention to everything is amazing. Look, we make 85% of our vehicles in the US, Matt. That means these are US factory workers versus even our domestic competitors — they're some of the biggest importers in the US. We're not building these vehicles in South Korea or Japan. These are American workers beating Toyota and Hyundai and our domestics who import their vehicles. We beat them all with American workers with the attention to detail.
It's an incredibly compelling narrative, I agree. Of course, being at Bloomberg, we're focused on the numbers, and quality issues, recalls, and the like had dragged down profits and margins to some extent over the past few years. Can you quantify in dollar terms how much this will contribute to your recovery this year?
Hundreds of millions of improvement. We're seeing our warranty coverages come down. We're seeing our recall costs come down. These are all contributing to literally hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars of a tailwind for Ford on cost. But we didn't stop there. We also negotiated our parts costs with our suppliers. We've looked at all of our bill of material and even our manufacturing inventory in our plants and all our manufacturing logistics costs.
Imagine for Ford Pro, it's the most important. You've got incredible growth there. You've got double-digit margins. You've got 30% subscription growth. Correct me if I'm wrong on any of those numbers.
Well, good question. I would say for Ford Pro, really what this means — Built Ford Tough really means something to our Pro customers on the vehicle side. But what we're really seeing there is an obsession with long-term powertrain durability. We're testing every engine to 200,000 to 300,000 miles with transmissions, axles, everything. So those Pro customers use their vehicles literally 90% of the day to run their business. They can not only be happy with 90-day quality, but also 5-10 year quality. That's what it means for our Pro customers.
13 more exchanges in this transcript
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Farley, J. (2026, June 25). Ford CEO Jim Farley Talks Culture Change | Bloomberg Talks [Interview transcript]. Bloomberg Podcasts. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1044874/
MLA
James Farley. "Ford CEO Jim Farley Talks Culture Change | Bloomberg Talks." Bloomberg Podcasts, 25 Jun. 2026. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1044874/.
BibTeX
@misc{farley2026_1044874,
author = {James Farley},
title = {Ford CEO Jim Farley Talks Culture Change | Bloomberg Talks},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, Bloomberg Podcasts. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2026},
month = {jun},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1044874/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
