Name: Here's What Ford Is Doing to Promote Growth
Uploaded: 2015-12-16
Duration: 3 min 56 s
Description: CEO Mark Fields breaks down the company's plan.

Talk about what's going right my understand is the brightest thing going right is a pick- up truck called the F- 150. Well, the F- 150 is a really important truck for us but when you look at our core business we have built a really strong foundation for the company for the last number of years. Well, this year, as we close the year here in the U. S. we'll be this 6 years in a row Best Selling brand. Our F- series trucks, the best selling vehicle in the marketplace for many many years, and the best selling truck. Our car lineup, our SUV lineup, and importantly all the things we're doing around electrification, as we're electrifying our vehicles. And we actually made an announcement just last week, where between now and the end of the decade, we're gonna invest another 4. 5 billion dollars. In electrification so that by the time we gate to that time period almost 40 % of our lineup will be electrified. We'll either have conventional hybrids, plugin hybrids or full battery electric vehicles. 40 % just give everybody a sense of where you are right now how many electric Vehicles of any type do you have right now and what percentage of the fleet does that represent? When you look at our electrification across our nameplates right now, it's about 13 %. Higher than I would have expected. In terms of the number of nameplates. In terms of our sales as an industry, electrified vehicles are only about two and half percent of the total industry. But our view, again, taking that point of view of the world. Looking at those societal factors is that, first of when people get into electric vehicles they love them, but at the same time we're doing it to meet regulatory requirements as well, so we expect that to grow, but when you look across our line up obviously the F1- 50, an extremely important product, but our entire line up is doing extremely well. And the company is doing extremely well and it's really focusing on great products and experiences for consumers. Let me ask what might seem like a naive question. I'm assuming that cheap gas is very god for Ford right now. Is that correct? Well, when you look at gas, it's clearly driving consumers to buy larger vehicles than they have in the past. Which is good for our business. Then again, our point of view is over time, let's face it, oil is a non- renewable resource. So over time our view is at some point it's gonna go up again. And that's why for every one of our vehicles, we want them to be the very best in terms of fuel economy. Cuz it's very interesting, even in Michigan, gas is the cheapest it is in the country right now. It's about $ 1. 70 a gallon. And even at $ 1. 70 a gallon, fuel economy for consumers is still really important. This is based on surveys? Yeah, surveys and anecdotals. But also surveys, because people have long memories. They've seen how gas prices spike. And they wanna make sure that whatever vehicle they're buying, it's the best fuel economy they can get. Okay, talk a little more, so $ 4. 5 billion That's a lot of money to be investing, even for a big company like Ford. Talk about how you got to that amount, what you're gonna accomplish with that, and thinking also in terms of what the alternative manufacturers look like, are you gonna be able to do that profitably? Well that's obviously our intent as a company, and we have been, obviously, very, very profitable. But our point of view is we're actually in a leadership position on electrification. We're the number two seller of electrified vehicles in the US, and we're actually the number one seller of plug- in hybrids. So this is a- Remind me what that car is. One of them is the Fusion. Uh- huh. The Fusion plug- in. But we also have our C- MAX Energi, as well. But We really wanna build on that leadership, and part of this investment is to do that. But it all comes down to our strategy, what we call power of choice. So whether a customer wants a great internal combustion engine, or a diesel, or a conventional hybrid, a plug- in hybrid, or a full battery electric vehicle, we'll be there for them no matter where the market takes us. [ BLANK_AUDIO ]

CEO Mark Fields breaks down the company's plan.