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Four car companies have got new chief executives this week. What does it all mean for the cars you'll be seeing down the road?
Ford will now be run by Mark Fields. To a degree this means more of the same. Ford's boss since 2006, Alan Mulally, managed to turn around an over-complex company hamstrung by internal battles as well as crippling financial debt. He sold off Jaguar Land Rover, Aston Martin, Volvo and Ford's stake in Mazda, not necessarily because they were losing money (they weren't all, not all the time) but because they were a distraction. He wanted to see the whole of Ford focussed on sorting out a unified global range of cars.
During those years Fields himself was increasingly Mulally's right-hand man. So no-one expects Fields to rip it all up now. Mulally is an engineer who had a significent role in all the major civil aircraft of his previous employer, Boeing. But isn't a car engineer. At Ford, he let the engineers get on with their job. Fields isn't an engineer either, but he has a feel for cars.
I spent some time with Fields last year. He said at one point, "As a young man I lived at home. I could have bought an apartment, or carried on living at home and buy a 1983 Nissan Z, my dream car. Well I still have that car."
Fields has considerable international experience. He ran Mazda from 1998, when he was just 38, and then in 2002 was sent to lead Ford's so-called Premier Automotive Group (JLR, Volvo, Aston) after Wolfgang Reitzle departed.
He says he fought for LR to develop its own platform for the Discovery and Range Rover Sport, rather than do Detroit's bidding and accept the Explorer base. "Sometimes cost matters and scale matters, but in other areas you have to ignore cost to drive revenue," he told me. He also got the nod for the aluminium XJ around the same time.
But then he was called to the Detroit to run Ford's American operations. The global corporation was losing money at a terrifying rate, and bankruptcy was a real possibility (as it became a reality for rivals GM and Chrysler). Mulally re-mortgaged the company, and losing JLR, Volvo and Aston was the collateral. And they had to unify the global operations to cut costs. Fields was, and remains, pivotal to that effort.
So the priorities now remain as they have been. Specific pinch points are to get Europe profitable, rescue Lincoln, make sure the all-new and crucial aluminium F150 truck is safely launched and keep up the impressive expansion in China.
What are his thoughts on Europe? Get the factories busy, which cuts cost. It's why they closed the Belgian plant, causing the delay to the new Mondeo. But those decisions were before his time. From now on, he says: "Our big bets in Europe are SUVs and crossovers. We're playing to the strength we have. We're participating in a growth segment."
Soon he'll have three crossovers: the Ecosport, Kuga and soon the new Edge too. Isn't the Edge an American vehicle wedged into this continent for Ford's convenience? Fields denies it. "We had global design reviews. But we tailor things like the controls, suspension, brakes and tyres to each continent."
He goes on. "We have to share engineering globally. We couldn't have done the Kuga and next S-Max without global engineering. And without the One Ford plan we wouldn't have the new Mustang in Europe."
Written By:- Paul Horrell
More of this article on the Top gear website
