Ford Motor Company in the USA has announced it is accelerating the Ford+ plan for growth and value creation with key leadership changes to support the development of breakthrough electric vehicles (EVs) at scale.
Doug Field has been named chief advanced product development and technology officer. In this expanded role, Field will continue to oversee electric vehicle products, software and digital systems development and advanced driver assistance, while also taking on design and vehicle hardware engineering.
Lisa Drake, vice president of EV industrialisation, will now also be responsible for manufacturing engineering as Ford scales to a run rate of two million EVs per year by the end of 2026.
Chuck Gray, who has been vice president, EV technology, is named vice president, vehicle hardware engineering. Both Drake and Gray report to Field, as does Anthony Lo, Ford’s chief design officer.
Jim Farley, Ford president and CEO, said: “As we enter an intense period of execution for Ford Model e and our $50 billion investment in breakthrough electric and digital vehicles, Doug, Lisa and Chuck are taking on larger roles and building out very capable teams.
“Developing and scaling the next generation of electric and software-defined vehicles requires a different focus and mix of talent from the accomplished Ford team and many exciting new colleagues joining our company.”
Among those new colleagues are four leaders with Silicon Valley credentials who will strengthen Ford’s push to develop fully connected, software-defined vehicles and advanced driver assistance systems.
Roz Ho is appointed chief connected vehicle software officer. Ho joins Ford next month from HP, where she was vice president and global head of software. Previously, she served in several leadership roles during her 22-year tenure at Microsoft.
Ho will work closely with Jae Park, who recently joined Ford as vice president, digital product design, after successful stints at Google and Amazon. They join Sammy Omari, executive director of advanced driver assist technologies (formerly of Motional, a joint venture of Hyundai and Aptiv) and Rob Bedichek, executive director of platform architecture (formerly of Intel and Apple).
This leadership team, supporting outstanding talent at Ford, is setting the direction on technology platforms for Ford’s next generation of zero-emission vehicles and products.
At the same time, Ford is transforming its global supply chain management capability to support efficient and reliable sourcing of components, internal development of key technologies and capabilities, and world-class cost and quality execution.
These changes are fitting with Ford’s electric future which is already growing at a rapid rate. The company recently announced it had a strong August with electric vehicle sales up 307 percent.
While sales for the overall industry were up 4.8 percent compared to a year ago, Ford grew at a faster pace of 27.3 percent for the month. Ford’s total market share increased 2.4 percentage points from August of last year to its current level of 13.4 percent for the month.
