Bill Ford, welcome to Axios.
Thank you so much. Thanks.
What a treat.
So, Bill, you have an iconic name, an iconic brand, an iconic industry, and an iconic city. So, we can go down right now to Union Station and for two weeks in the Grand Hall there, we can see the first Model T, the first Mustang all the way down to, and this is for Roy Schwarz, your F1 partnership with Red Bull. With that kind of history backstage, you were talking about the future. How do you keep that discipline?
I mean, we have a wonderful history and it's something I'm very proud of, but history, I love our history, but it guarantees you nothing for the future, right? So, I'm much more interested about where we're going next and sort of how we keep the company going for another 123 years. And I think with the rate of change in technology, you know, you asked me backstage kind of how far out can you look and
on how we're going to get around. Yeah.
Yeah. And I said, you know, and my answer was if you'd asked me that, you know, probably 10 years ago, I could have said 25, 30 years. I think today though technology is compressing the time change for everything to the point where it's really hard to look beyond the next five years. I mean, because you think about, you know, you've got AI coming in, well not coming in, it's already here and it's helping us with our business. You have autonomous driving, flying vehicles are now in prototype stages. So I mean, I think anything's possible but it's as I say the time frame is really compressing.
How likely do you think flying cars, total autonomy will be by the time Feldman's kids are driving or my nieces and nephews are driving?
Oh, well, autonomy is here. Ubiquitous autonomy. It won't be long. But you know, it won't be for everybody and it won't be for every use case either. I mean, you may own a vehicle for, you know, that you want to drive, but if you're in a major city and it's a hassle, you'll just jump into an AV vehicle and it'll take you, robo taxi, if you will, take you from point A to point B. And that's already happening in many cities. Flying cars might be a little further. Most people have trouble in two dimensions, much less three. So, but they are technically very possible.
So, in five years, how different will our roads look?
Well, it's interesting. So, you mentioned Michigan Central station in Detroit, and one of the things we've got there is we use it as a test bed for new things. One of the things we're doing there is we have inductive charging where you drive down a street and the street charges your electric vehicle as you drive. So, I mean, but that obviously is an expensive tear up to city streets, but it's really more showing what can be done and in some cases will be done. And so the pace of change will really depend a lot on the adoption of technology and also each city's appetite for the new technology.
So Bill, a rare moment of bipartisan agreement. You've been coming to Washington forever. You've seen it deteriorate. But in March, a study by Morning Consult found that both Republicans and Democrats rate Ford number one for most American brand. How do you build and keep a brand like that?
Yeah, it's well, it's something that I'm very proud of and it's something that I've been intentional. I've, you know, we are the most American. We make the most vehicles here. We employ the most Americans and it costs us to do that. When a lot of our competitors, you know, build overseas or not even overseas but in different countries, it was very important to me that we stay the most American company and as I say that there's a financial penalty to do that. But I think it pays off in the long run and I think it's about what you stand for as a company. I mean, one of the things about being a family company and we are still a family company after 1233 years. In fact, my son Nick is out here somewhere today.
Let's greet Nick. Nick Ford.
Oh, there he is back there. Yeah, he's the corporate strategy director.
Nick, an honor to have you here.
So, but one of the things about being a family company is there are values and those values are passed from generation to generation. And you could say, well, what are those values? Well, they're pretty simple. It's taking care of each other, taking care of our communities, taking care of our country. And we've been there whenever our country needed us. Whether we were the arsenal of democracy in two world wars, during COVID, we switched over to make ventilators, respirators, all the personal protection equipment. And it was interesting too during COVID, I think it woke a lot of people in government up or reminded them that we can make a lot of complex things. We took respirator and ventilator designs where the original designer of that could make a handful a month and we can make a thousand a week. And so kind of where we are today in America is our industrial base unfortunately has shrunk to the point where there are companies that can make complex things. There are companies that can make a lot of things. There are very few companies that can make a lot of complex things. And so we want to make sure that we can do that for this country.
