If you think about Ford’s electric vehicle business as a baseball game –metaphorically speaking, of course – we’re at the bottom of the first inning, according to Ford Executive Chairman Bill Ford. 

“It’s still very early days on our EV journey,” said Ford at a recent meeting of Ford Retired Engineering Executives (FREE). “There’s a lot of time and effort ahead of us, but I love where we’re positioned right now.”

Ford talked about the recent formation of new business units – including Ford Blue, Ford Model e and Ford Pro – and said it’s an amazing time to be at the company.

“The kind of change and opportunity we have in front of us now is nothing like anything I've ever seen in my lifetime,” he said, referring to not only the movement toward EVs but the transition from being a hardware-led company to a technology-led organization.   

“That’s something very different for me as well,” he said.  “I’ve spent my entire life on hardware issues – styling, horsepower, suspension and all those kinds of things.  And, of course, they’re all going to be important going forward as well, but now so much of everything we’re doing is software-driven.”   

Ford said today’s unique environment provides the company with an opportunity to win in a way that we never have before.   

“In this new world of electric vehicles there are going to be winners and losers.  And the losers won’t be defined by losing a couple of points of market share, which was the truth for most of my working lifetime,” he explained.  “All of a sudden now there are going to be companies that make this journey to EVs and companies that simply can’t make the journey because they don’t have the balance sheet, the engineers, the software talent or the ability to reach the customers.”

Ford praised the company’s management team led by Jim Farley and said one of the things he’s most impressed by is the type of talent being recruited.

“We hired Tesla’s last two chief engineers” he said, referring to Doug Field, Chief EV & Digital Systems Offer for Ford Model e, and Alan Clarke who works with Field as executive director of Advanced EV Development.  “The talent used to go from us to them.  Now it’s coming from them to us.  It’s becoming very apparent that if you have superstars in software, they become talent magnets for other talented software engineers.”

Also proving to be quite successful are the company’s first EV offerings – the Mustang Mach-E and the all-new F-150 Lightning.

“It’s just overwhelmed us,” said Ford.  “The people that have done test drives in the Lightning are truly blown away by it, and the Mach-E is sold out.  In some ways that’s the good news, but it’s also bad news because we’re leaving sales on the table.”

Ford said the ongoing chip shortage coupled with the COVID pandemic continues to limit the number of vehicles that Ford can manufacture.

“Our supply chain people are in hand-to-hand combat every morning, but that’s the world we’re in,” he said.  “We have periodic shutdowns across the globe when we least expect it, and sometimes it’s not our Tier 1 suppliers but the Tier 2s and Tier 3s.  We’re still fighting our way through all of that and probably will be for certainly the balance of this year.  And it’s frustrating because our products are being so well received, and we wish we could make many, many more of them.”

Noting how quickly the world is moving, Ford said one of the things that he hopes to see more of at the company is faster decision-making.

“We’ve never been known as a company that is wildly nimble, but we’ve got to get faster,” he said.  “We have to eliminate bureaucracy and hierarchy.  That’s why we set up the separate business units so that they can manage themselves, be free of a lot of the bureaucracy and go as fast as they can.”

Ford emphasized that each of the business units is crucial to the company’s success.

“A lot of the skillsets that are in Ford Blue are going to be needed in Ford Model e and the same with Ford Pro,” he said.  “There’s a lot of cross-pollination that is going to be going on, which is also why it’s so important that everybody feel like they’re pulling in the same direction and part of the same team.”