Bill Ford: "One Thing I'll Tell You for Sure: Our Ability to Forecast Has Been Just Horrible""
Loose cannons. Where would TTAC be without them? Now that GM Car Czar Bob Lutz has his bankruptcy-proof pension to think about (no thanks needed for the early heads-up, Bob), the man of Maximum has somehow learned to shut the f up. Bob “Operationally Bankrupt” Nardelli hasn’t said boo to a goose since telling the feds he wasn’t earning any salary for driving Chrysler into the history books. Ford’s Presidente del Americas Mark Fields is flying low, maybe even commercial. The head of the Presidential Task Force on Autos, Steve “Chooch” Rattner, is as taciturn as he is tyrannical. These days, GM’s VP (“Very Profitable”) Mark LaNeve is about as good/bad as it gets. At least until last night, when former Ford CEO Bill Ford played BMOC (big man on campus) at the green love-in known as this year’s Fortune Brainstorm Green conference. The MSM has yet to chronicle the PC hoedown. But according to earth2tech.com (who supplied our headline quote), Former FoMoCo CEO Bill Ford’s mea culpa was mucho maxima.
While the company has brought in a legion of experts over the years to help with vehicle planning — helping to anticipate where the market would move over the three to five years it took to develop a new vehicle — but it “might as well have just tossed darts,” said Ford.
Just a few years ago, he said, the buzz at a conference like this one, held in Southern California, would have been about hydrogen cars, which he said “would have been the holy grail,” and ethanol blends, for which the company has made a big push with its flex-fuel vehicle lineup. Even now, he said, it’s not at all clear to the company where vehicle technology will end up.
GreenTech confirms Ford’s ongoing lack of, uh, focus. Or is that its sensible policy of spreading its bets on a various environmental technologies (excluding, it now seems, hydrogen fuel cells)? We deride, you report.
In an effort to make more fuel-efficient vehicles, Ford Motor is placing its bets on a number of alternative technologies, including electric vehicles, biofuels, and clean diesel.
Confident yet? Well, Ford didn’t forget the whole small, conventionally-powered automobile thing.
Ford plans to bring small cars designed originally for congested cities in Europe to the U.S., he said.
“The downsizing of the fleet is going to happen. We at Ford are placing a big bet on that,” he said. “It’s a bet we’re making because we believe that it’s the right thing to do. Whether we get the timing right–don’t know.”
It’s too bad GM made the Cavalier, if you know what I mean.
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Ford will benefit mightily if they are successful in dramatically improving their forecasting, although there is always that element of surprise, both good and bad. While The Ford Motor Company is cleaning house, please oh please get rid of the committee that takes a very well done pre-production unit and seeks to take $200 out of it. The net result 100 percent of the time is reducing the desirability by $2,000 which leads straight to the 7-item incentive pac five months into production. Look at reviewers’ net list of beefs and the balance more often tilts to a cheapened design decision rather than a clearly poor design. European and Asian car manufacturer’s do it also but they far better resist going for that last $200. Detroit has not learned this lesson.
Ford’s vehicles, like the other Detroit products, have been horribly nickel-and-dimed. If Mulally went to the Chief Designers of each product and personally approved a net $200 “quality improvement” for each, you’d hear a big WAHOO! that would rattle that town. Each would have a terrible time paring down the list of dozens and dozens of things to improve but it would be a labor of love.