Keith Naughton , Alex Webb , and Mark Bergen
Bill Ford is tired of hearing the future of cars belongs to Silicon Valley. Yet for years, the Apple and Google crowd have been telling him that only Big Tech can make driverless vehicles.
“There was this presumption that we were too dumb to get it,” said the Ford Motor Co. executive chairman and great-grandson of auto pioneer Henry Ford. “The conversation has really shifted.”
He’s not kidding. Tech giants Apple Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google, once intent on disrupting, if not destroying, Detroit, have concluded for now that they don’t want to build cars. Sure, they still bank on supplying the autonomous software that will drive robot rides, but the concession that they’re not up to the complex task of mass production tilts the balance of power to traditional automakers.