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.
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.
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!'
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.
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.
As long as gas is cheaper than bottled water, we can't be in a position of dictating to the consumer what to buy.
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.
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 believe fuel cells could end the 100-year reign of the internal combustion engine.
At Ford Motor Company, we believe the arts speak a common language that weaves a common thread among all people.
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 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 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.
One cannot find a healthy economy anywhere in the world that does not have a strong industrial base, period.
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.
One of the things I've had the advantage of, growing up and being close to the top management of this company and other companies for most of my life, is seeing how CEOs start to believe in their own infallibility. And that really scares me.
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.
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.
I believe very strongly that corporations could and should be a major force for resolving social and environmental concerns in the twenty-first century.
