Chris Ziegler and Nilay Patel:
But recognizing a threat to the business is entirely different from effectively dealing with it. Can Ford course-correct enough to turn its disruption into a new revenue stream? “Our approach is to first disrupt ourselves,” he says during the course of our recent interview.
The line sounds like a talking point from a well-rehearsed presentation, and it is — Fields has been saying variations of it both on and off stage since he took over in 2014, famously announcing a slew of projects at his CES 2015 keynote that had very little to do with selling more cars. And by all appearances, it’s not just lip service: Ford recently spun off its next-generation mobility initiatives into a wholly owned subsidiary, Ford Smart Mobility LLC, with operations centered in Palo Alto. That’s a long, long way from Ford headquarters in Dearborn. (2,421 miles, to be exact.)
We sat down with Fields to discuss the spin-off, the state of his business, and what it means for the 113-year-old Ford Motor Company to exist in a post-car world.