WCA May 2010

Automotive

The Ford at the head of Ford Motor Company finds no joy in Toyota’s crisis over safety recalls On the face of it, Toyota’s ongoing troubles must benefit the other auto makers in the US market. For months now, bad press about the products of Toyota’s North American plants should have buoyed the spirits of the Japanese producer’s competitors – notably Ford Motor Co, best positioned of any of them to take advantage of an ill wind blowing on another producer. But the truth is quite otherwise. Bill Ford, executive chairman and great-grandson of legendary founder Henry Ford, struck a decidedly sombre and cautionary note on 16 th February when he spoke at a Chamber of Commerce luncheon in the Detroit suburb of Livonia. If members of his audience were disposed to quietly exult in the latest twist in a spectacular fall from grace – a US government request for proof of when Toyota learned of problems with its accelerator pedals and how long it waited before initiating recalls – Mr Ford was not. “I wouldn’t wish that on anybody,” he told the local business networkers, many of whom may remember the failure of Firestone tyres on Ford Explorers, in 2001. “We’ve had our own challenges. We’ve been through our own tough times.” Mr Ford asserted that the biggest issue facing his company is self-satisfaction and complacency. “Things have been going well for us for the last year,” he said. “But dial it back 18 months and you get a very different picture.” The reference was, of course, to the perilous if ultimately successful course steered by Ford Motor through the travails that brought its peers in the Detroit Big Three – General Motors and Chrysler – to near-ruin. Ford not only survived the auto industry shakeout of 2008 without a rescue by Washington; it also posted a $2.7-billion profit for 2009. And now Ford models have swept the 2010 North American car and truck of the year awards. But the Ford chairman reminded his listeners that the company “survived the abyss” by the skin of its teeth; also that “it is very early days” in the new era. What worries him the most, Mr Ford said, is that the company has always done well in times of adversity: “It is in handling prosperity where we get into trouble.” Detroit ❖ Free Press columnist Tom Walsh has been covering automotive Detroit long enough to be able to corroborate Bill Ford’s account of Ford Motor’s repeated lapses into periods of overconfidence and entitlement. That is why, in Mr Walsh’s view, the timing of Toyota’s trouble is good for Ford. He wrote, “If the world’s largest and most respected auto maker can get rocked so hard, so fast, the same thing – or worse – can happen to any competitor.” (“Toyota Turmoil Can Keep Ford, Others Humble,” 17 th February) Mr Walsh also suggested that the lesson of Toyota’s fall to earth would not have been lost on Alan Mulally, Ford’s president and CEO. The columnist reminded his readers, “Before being recruited from Boeing to Ford in 2006, [Mr Mulally’s] personal ride was a Lexus because, at the time, he considered Toyota’s luxury brand the world’s best.”

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Wire & Cable ASIA – May/June 2010