Making electric iconic: reflections on one year of change at Ford

Most people only get to celebrate one birthday a year. But I’m lucky enough to have two! Yesterday was my first anniversary of joining Ford Motor Company to lead the electrification of our passenger vehicle portfolio in Europe, and yes, my Model e team even surprised me with some birthday cake to mark the occasion.

In my first 12 months at this amazing business, I’ve spent as much time as I could out on the road. Meeting with Ford employees, customers and retail partners definitely beats sitting in the office, and I’ve learned a lot from talking to many of our seriously impressive team members from across Europe.

Together we’ve enjoyed some big successes. In March the Model e team revealed Ford’s first electric passenger vehicle built for customers in Europe, the Explorer, which has already had a fantastic reception from employees, our retailers and many customers old and new. This was truly a landmark moment for the whole company; the Explorer is the first real demonstration of the bold direction we are taking with our new range of passenger EVs in Europe.

Successes like these, and there are many others, are what make me so excited about what is still to come for our company. It’s become a mantra of mine that the automotive industry is going through its greatest transformation in 100 years. And every day I see the evidence of how Ford is embracing that change.

Let’s be honest, our sector was static for a long time. Maybe we got too comfortable building and selling the same kind of cars and worrying about the same old competitors. Maybe we were sometimes a little slow to respond to the technological changes that were happening in other industries, like electronics. Most certainly we were not listening to our customers closely enough.

No longer. That old world has been swept away as our customers demand to go electric and digital and we suddenly experience growing competition from Chinese automakers eyeing up the European market, not only with cars but experiences that make a customer’s life easier. On my travels I hear a lot of understandable anxiety from our employees about what the future holds.

The answer to that, simply, is a plan for the total reinvention of Ford. From our products and marketing to our industrial base and organizational structure, we are embracing totally new technologies and learning to understand the shifting expectations of our customers.

Much of this challenge is fun, but some of it is painful. Our vehicles, and the processes which make them, are becoming simpler. This means we have had to take complexity and costs out of our operations so we can properly compete with those disruptor brands and keep Ford viable for the future. I know this hasn’t been easy for many, myself included. But it is the only way forward.

Getting a new product like the Explorer on the road; building a software business; transforming our distribution network; opening a whole new innovative factory on the site where 18 million vehicles have been built over almost 100 years in Cologne. These are mammoth tasks which require time, hard work and financial investment. But we’re now starting to see the fruits of those efforts in our products, and making our business a success will follow.

That’s one of the reasons why I joined Ford in the first place: the opportunity to take the best of the heritage this company has created over 120 years and ready it for the next 100. Look at the iconic vehicles Ford has put on European roads: the Transit, the Fiesta and the Mustang, the most successful sports car in the world, to name only three.

Creating a line-up of equally iconic electric vehicles and carving the new Ford’s place in Europe is the best job anyone could have. I want to thank everyone in the wider Ford family around the globe who supported me in this first year. During my first 12 months, our teams have been laying the foundations of that future success, but it’s mostly been behind the scenes.

What I can’t wait to do over my second year at Model e is to start showing the results of our work to our customers. Once they start to see Ford EVs on the road, they will truly begin to understand what our brand can offer them.

And yes, I’m already looking forward to next year’s birthday cake as well.