The Ford family wants the company to succeed. Period.
— William Clay Ford, Jr.
Whenever I'm at a party, people are always telling me either to get a new quarterback or make the Taurus back seat bigger.
I bleed Ford blue.
When Henry Ford founded the company bearing his name in 1903, he saw the car as a means of providing freedom of mobility to people around the world.
I used to wonder if running a large industrial company would really square with my values.
Lewis Booth and Derrick Kuzak represent the very best of Ford and our culture and built a legacy of leadership, integrity and commitment to excellence that will benefit us for years to come.
Lyft is enabling an exciting new model of freedom and personal mobility, as evidenced by its millions of satisfied users.
You can take weight out of a car and truck and still make it very strong.
There are almost no limits in terms of what a car can become.
I was an absolutely untalented designer.
I don't want anybody, whether it's my grandchildren or any of our employees' grandchildren, to have to apologise for working for Ford Motor Company. In fact, I want the opposite. I want them to look and say, 'What a difference we made!'
My great-grandfather was a man of great vision, drive, and native intelligence, with some human flaws amplified by limited education, limited social range, and questionable influence from some of his advisers.
Just think in terms of green energy and how much time, money, brain power and policy action has started to pour into green energy, and I think that's wonderful. We're going to need that same kind of effort towards global gridlock if we're going to keep the individual mobility that we all take for granted today.
When I joined Ford, in the late 1970s, I felt strongly we could not forever be a huge user of natural resources without there being consequences. But I was alone in my thinking in those days.
One cannot find a healthy economy anywhere in the world that does not have a strong industrial base, period.
There is a great demand everywhere in the world for individual mobility. People like the fact they are not on somebody else's schedule. They can come and go as they please.
I walked in and inherited a management group that I didn't know very well. They didn't know me, and we had a very short window to put together a credible recovery plan.
I have no patience for wasting time.
What cooler way to grow up for an American boy than to be around cars and football?
As the technology is developed, autonomous driving could provide driving opportunities for the physically challenged or enable the elderly to continue driving longer. This will be vital as many nations experience an aging population.
Long commutes and traffic jams once associated with older, established cities such as London, New York or Tokyo are spreading throughout the world's emerging economies.
Nature is where my heart is.
I believe fuel cells could end the 100-year reign of the internal combustion engine.
Individuals and companies that want to be successful in the 21st century will need to be leaders in using the Internet and related technology.
I look at safety as, you know, there's active and passive. Passive is how do you survive a crash. Active is accident avoidance. And so that's real-time information to you, as a driver, and to your car, to the wheels of a car that will get you out of a bad situation.
I'm not motivated by money or power or fame. In the end, it doesn't bring much happiness. The only thing that is driving me is self-satisfaction, self-validation.
Ford comes first before everything else I do in my life.
There are people who think I'm a Bolshevik, and this is all a major distraction at best and heresy at worst. But I really don't care.
S.U.V.'s are under a lot of scrutiny these days, and yet the S.U.V. buyer is a very loyal lot.
I think I was the first executive to ever speak at a Greenpeace business conference, in London in 2001. That didn't play well here at Ford, but I thought it was an important signal to send internally, that these were the kind of issues we needed to be grappling with.
As long as gas is cheaper than bottled water, we can't be in a position of dictating to the consumer what to buy.
All things being equal, I think people would still prefer to do business with their hometown companies. That's true in America, that's true in China, that's true in Germany.
Nobody's irreplaceable, including me. I think for too long we've had a cult of personality in this company and in this industry, and frankly, I'd like to see that diminish.
When we're in a peak, we make a ton of money, and as soon as we make a ton of money, we're desperately looking for a way to spend it. And we diversify into areas that, frankly, we don't know how to run very well.
My father didn't push me.
In the time of the robber barons, my great grandfather insisted on reinvesting and sharing profits with workers... He was told he was a socialist, that he was not welcome on Wall Street.
Cars will talk to each other and the world around them to make driving both safer and more efficient. 'Vehicle-to-vehicle' and 'vehicle-to-infrastructure' connectivity will become commonplace.
The climate is changing, and anyone who disagrees is, in my view, still in denial.
I don't know if a company can have a soul, but I like to think it can.
There's a rising tide of environmental awareness and activism among consumers that's going to continue to swell in the 21st century. Smart companies will get ahead of that wave and ride it to success and prosperity. Those that don't are headed for a wipeout.
Manufacturing still has the greatest multiplier effect, in terms of job creation, of any sector of the economy.
It's hard to store natural gas. And it does require big storage tanks. So it doesn't work very well on passenger cars.
The Ford Motor Co. should stand for something more than cars and trucks. There is a Ford way of doing things that we cannot lose... We need to be continuously polishing that Ford oval.
The day will come when the notion of car ownership becomes antiquated. If you live in a city, you don't need to own a car.
At Ford Motor Company, we believe the arts speak a common language that weaves a common thread among all people.
My father was a great business leader and humanitarian who dedicated his life to the company and the community. He also was a wonderful family man, a loving husband, father, grandfather and great-grandfather. He will be greatly missed by everyone who knew him, yet he will continue to inspire us all.
I never wanted Ford to be a place, like the tobacco industry, where our employees were not proud of coming to work for us. I felt there was a danger of that, should we be marginalized as a major polluter.
I believe very strongly that corporations could and should be a major force for resolving social and environmental concerns in the twenty-first century.
I don't care where you are in the world, people are aware of what technology is available to others. If you're in Nairobi, you're certainly aware of the iPhone.
I think the world is filled with so much hype and PR bull. Frankly, it all comes out in the end. Good or bad, I'd rather just let our accomplishments really speak for themselves.
