Ford Is Now a ‘Personal Mobility’ Company: How the Comeback Kids Are Riding Tech to a New Destiny
Every innovator is thinking about what’s next. But it’s the ones who are thinking about what’s after what’s next that are the true visionaries and disrupters.
Bill Ford is one those.
In the 1980s and ’90s, when most of the auto companies were building bigger and bigger vehicles and the public was gobbling up huge SUVs, Bill Ford was trying to convince Ford Motor Company to build more fuel-efficient, environmentally friendly cars and trucks. He was almost completely stonewalled by the executives at Ford.
However, he’s now the executive chairman of the company that his great grandfather Henry Ford founded in 1903, and while the rest of the automotive industry is now racing to see who’s going to build the best electric and alternative fuel vehicles, Bill Ford has his sights set on the next challenge.
“Everybody’s focused on the environmental issue with cars, and rightly so, but I believe in my lifetime we’re going to solve that,” said Ford. “It’s either going to be through electric or hydrogen. We are going to make clean cars, and we’re well on our way to having the technology to do that. But even as we’re doing that, another issue is coming at us called global gridlock. We’ve got a billion cars on the road today and 7 billion people in the world. By midcentury we’re going to be about 9 billion people and 4 billion cars on the road.”