Ford puts trust in ‘car guy’ to face existential threat from tech giants
Jim Farley is a “car guy.” That is how Ford Motor Co.’s executive chairman Bill Ford described the man who was this week named as new chief executive of the U.S. automotive giant.
Farley will need all his knowledge and love of cars to turn around the Detroit auto manufacturer, which struggled with flagging profitability, a falling share price and high debt during Jim Hackett’s three-year reign.
This time, the carmaker has chosen an insider, who owns and races vintage cars, for the top job after alternating between company veterans and industry outsiders for the past decade.
The grandson of a Ford employee, who became heir apparent in February when he was promoted to chief operating officer, is a contrast to Hackett, an outsider who came from office furniture maker Steelcase Inc.
The 58-year-old, born in Argentina and educated at Georgetown University and University of California, Los Angeles, or UCLA, has spent his life devoted to cars.
During his teenage years, he rebuilt car engines and went to work after college for Toyota Motor Corp., where he held product and marketing positions, becoming group vice-president for the luxury Lexus brand.
In 2007, he joined Ford after being recruited by then-chief executive Alan Mulally. He ran the carmaker’s European operations between 2015 and 2017 and then headed the company’s mobility and technology divisions, a perch that made it clear to him as a product planner “that from the customers’ viewpoint we have so much more we need to do.”
Confronting the worst recession in nearly a century and the existential threat that electric and autonomous vehicles present for a traditional carmaker such as Ford, he will need his marketing background to help him understand the need for emotion and story around vehicles to command a premium for his models, Auto Trader analyst Michelle Krebs said.
This week he admitted Ford’s competitive landscape had broadened beyond other traditional rivals to include technology companies such as Amazon.com Inc., Apple Inc. and Baidu Inc.
“The ambition for those technology companies in our space is very, very high,” Farley told the Financial Times.
“I am sure we will have a frenemy relationship.”
“There’s about 100 different ways that Ford wants to go and needs to go, but how they get there is a big question,” said Brett Smith, technology director at the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor, Mich.
“It’s this question, this challenge of taking a company that has done one thing really well for 110 years and making it into something that it is not ... It’s just a really, really big lift.”
Smith added that Farley’s “willingness to expand and explore,” which he showed at Toyota when he launched Scion, a car meant to attract younger drivers, should serve him well as Ford pushes forward with electrification.
With Scion, buyers were allowed to customize their vehicle through branded auto parts, a new approach for a traditional automaker.
Critical for Ford is turning around the stock price, which has been on the slide for nearly a decade, in contrast to rising shares at U.S. rivals General Motors Co. and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles.