good afternoon everyone I'm Julia Boron and I'm cnbc's senior media and Technology correspondent it is truly an honor to be here at the aspman Institute to get to interview Ford CEO Jim Farley um since Jim took over Ford in 20 2020 he's really worked to transform the organization with more transformation ahead which is what we're going to get to talk about today um but I want to start out with an opad you just published this morning um for those of you who haven't gone to read it Jim's going to walk you through because it really lays out your vision particularly around electric vehicles thank you nice to be here Julie thank you so much for the time and thank you all for coming I'll just show one picture kind of summarize Maybe Who I Am which is um put that up the slide I see I see a great picture here but can we get it up here as well know someday it will come up it's a picture of me when I was 16 um here we go and it pretty much explains who I'm as a person I drove a R the country uh without a driver's license and insurance uh much did my parents chrin in Michigan with uh with my Mustang that had bought that summer and lived in and Resto and and built a new engine and since then all I've really worked on and thought about is cars I'm just a old school car person and I guess I wrote the oped because I think many of us at Ford started to get tired of all the politics in the EV business um and I guess from my perspective it's time to really take a step back and reflect on what it's like to actually drive an electric vehicle not for to save the plant apart but everything else the actual human experience of driving electric vehicle is wonderful and for someone like a petrol head like me whose family's from Detroit uh I think the next picture or a few one uh that's me and my electric lightning uh which I took a road trip uh across California all the way down California with my son last summer and I learned a lot as a leader but that's my daily driver I drive an electric lightning and um I'm totally converted and I don't know why we're all stuck talking about these vehicles as if all they really do is have no carbon footprint what really to me what really convinced me of why we should invest in EVS on a personal level is because the experience of driving past the gas station of effortless acceleration on the highway uh or passing someone or decelerating without using the brakes um and if you go to the next slide I just it's amazing we have modems in all of our vehicles when you actually look how Americans Drive which we have the longest spaces only the average American only takes less than four trips more than 150 miles the normal range max range now even on a cold day for an Eevee now is about 300 miles so 95% of Americans would have no problem living with an EV and not really having to charge on the road very often with home charging next slide is um early on it was a really expensive thing but with the collapse of the EV pricing it's basically made EVS the same price as an internal combustion engine vehicle now and for the future uh Ford which is the only company didn't go bankrupt only familyowned car company um it's really important for us to sort through this next slide so I wrote the opad because this is my grandfather he was a 389th employee of Ford he joined when he was 14 that's his ID card in 1918 uh he had been at the company for four years he started a year before Henry Ford introduced the moving assembly line which he was all pissed off about because he used to build the whole car and now he just built Wheels um and like so many millions of families around the world affected by the Ford motor company my mom went to college because of his job at Ford and our whole family was transformed because of the company and if we don't make this EV transition Ford's not going to make it that's how important this is for our country um and I just wish more people would be talking about the experience of driving instead of the politics of Eevee um such an amazing family history that really explains your passion for the role that you're in today and also for this next phase of Ford but I want to just back up a little bit to what is keeping people from driving EVS there's range anxiety and people are worried they're not going to be able to to find a charger or if it is a charger is it the kind that they can use um what should what should consumers be thinking right now especially as we see the sale of hybrids rise in a way that many people didn't expect there was an expectation that we would just make a shift towards EVS but instead we've seen hybrids really really benefit from an increase in totally true well I think first of all Ford believes in Power of Choice so we're also number three in hybrids so we're number two in EVS for two and a half years now to Tesla we're also number three in hybrid behind h a Toyota that largely bet on hybrids and didn't bet on EVS we're the only company that actually offers all of it so we get to see the customers with with a hybrid like F-150 25% so F-150 is the bestselling vehicle on our country for 47 years and as far as total revenue it's number two to I the iPhone in total revenue because they're like $55,000 and we sell more than a million of them we make a F-150 every 40 seconds so um 25% of all F-150s are hybrids now and one of the most popular features of the hybrid is exportable power many people in Texas and in flor Florida and in California buy F-150 hybrids because they can power their house for 2 weeks when the power goes out that's a sad statement about our country but that's the reality um and so hybrids have become more popular our hybrid business is up 40% this year and the pricing power is more than the cost of both power trains that means we make more money on a hybrid than on internal combustion F-150 now um I think hybrid simple right you go in it's 2 miles per gallon better on City and Highway you do the simple calculus you know net present value of that and you can kind of tell is it worth $2 and electric for Main Street customers we're way past the early adopters now and for the last two years those early adopters are doing different math they don't know about insurance they don't know about the repair cost they don't know how to compare electrons to fuel even though it's 65% cheaper electrons um it's just a it's a new thing uh for the math I mean for customers but that's okay the indication of hybrid is a good indication that electrification will go faster because even the most traditional truck customers are buying hybrid they're interested in electrification it's just not a f electric this is a picture by the way electric is nothing new we could easily be having this conversation about internal combustion I just want to show this picture because my grandfather used to tell about all buddies who worked in in Detroit and they didn't work at Ford they worked at Detroit electric this is the ad from 1909 in 1909 in our industry a third was steam a third was electric and a third was combustion there was no guarantee that Henry Ford was going to win we could easily be having this conversation now going well every car is electric why the heck do we have to put this gasoline in our vehicle um easily could have happened so I I think and when you read that ad it's really interesting nothing about electric it's all about how it feels to drive and the predominant customers were women because they didn't have to crankstart the vehicle um they didn't have to get dirty they didn't need a chauffeur they could drive themselves um I guess my point is that we're in the first or second inning a nine inning game and right now it's about choice and Regulators need to get their head around that they can't be just betting on all electric they need to understand that customers will make this transition based on their duty cycle based on the way they drive bed on the number of vehicles they have in their household and and the transition is going to happen but do you think that it's misguided to really focus so much just on a total EV model yes but I think it's equally misguided to portray EVS as something the total solution or the wrong solution but let's talk a little bit about pricing though because you've said that EV should not be subsidized and automakers should push to profitably produce EVS what do you see is a reasonable timeline for that uh five years the next generation of vehicles I think you're going to see but you have to make a radical change as an oem to get to a profitable EV the first thing we have to do is is really put all of our Capital towards smaller more affordable EVS that's the duty cycle that we've now found that really matches these big huge enormous EVS they're never going to make money the battery is $50,000 even with low nickel lfp chemistry the batteries will never be affordable so we need to really redo our cycle plan to reflect what we've learned smaller vehicles and Commercial what people aren't talking about we're number one in commercial the commercial tivic journey is going super fast much faster than we thought the electric Transit which is the number one van in the US the mix is more than twice what we thought all electric because people can have Depot charging if you're a plumber electrician you know exactly what your route's going to be it's repeatable you don't over buy the battery so it's not super expensive um a retail customers are buying 300 mile batteries never use them when we see the data commercial they use 95% of their battery every day um so commercial is going much faster I think we as an industry have to do our part there's also ex kind of a a China thing here you stole my next question yeah China is making very inexpensive EVs and has better infrastructure for charging yes and all the trillions of profitability that were were taken out of China by the Western oems they were busy thinking about their industry strategically and they bet on electrification about 10 years ago and now they make 70% of all electric vehicles in the world are made in one country they own all the battery processing you want graphite you want lithium processed to put in a battery automotive battery a nickel you need to go to China so um they have unique battery chemistry like lfp iron phosphate which is half the cost has no fire risk and can be charged twice as many cycles so there's unique IP in China now and many of the companies are sponsored by the government so we as a company face a kind of ultimate fitness test on this question of making money on EVS if we cannot make money on EVS we have competitors who have the largest market in the world who already dominate globally who are already setting up their supply chain around the world and if we don't if we don't make profitable EVS next five years what's the future we just shrinking into North America so to talk a little bit more about competition with China how do you see the Biden administration's tariffs on EVS impacting the Chinese government and how they approach you um and afford it and also other automakers yes well I think it's the that the answer to that question is very different for each Auto Company we do not have a big China business GM has a huge one Volkswagen has enormous I think 60% % of Volkswagen's Global profit comes from China so every company has a different exposure um look I think the the tariffs and the policy decisions that the president has to make quickly will level the playing field um the state subsidies of free taxes free land uh a lot of R&D you know we don't have the benefit from the IRA really does help it incentivizes us for making automotive batteries in the US we made many decisions to actually make in the US now because of the IRA but the biggest issue is those are going to be speed bumps I worked at Toyota for 25 years as an American I mean we have NAFTA they're 25% of the Mexican market already the Chinese we can all drive to Mexico one day one out of every four vehicles sold in Mexico is made by a Chinese company and they will have enough scale in China to build PL there and Export tariff free to the US that's only a matter of time that's why we have to be fully fit that's why we created Skunk Works because we have to compete against the Chinese players and and the biggest thing the Administration has to do on on creating a Level Playing Field is that people don't really realize how technologically risky these products are the the new vehicles that we're making at Ford or any of the western oems are data collection machines um we have to to run the vehicles so they're like mobile drones we have eight cameras on the average Ford who you talk to where you go who you drive by you know and in China we're not allowed to drive to Park a Ford next to a government building because of all those cameras so what is what is the administration going to do about about data privacy in China they have those rules we do not have them in the US we're talking about concerns about tiktock but we talking about forget about Huawei and Tik Tock think about a Chinese vehicle and what what their government could learn about our country let alone partial electrification you can crash the car in anything you want remotely so these vehicles so in China if we want to get our partial electric hands-free uh AV approved we have to go through their defense department Elon was just there getting a by the way Elon deserves a lot of credit for this um Journey about electrification he really does but back to China you know for our National Defense we have to make up our mind what kind of approval should we send a Chinese oem's self-driving system through in our country these are the real policy decisions and then we have to get serious about being independent about processing raw materials and in again whether we do it with friendly countries like Canada or or other places like South America or do it ourselves or else we're just trading one dependency for another and so talk a little bit more about that in this idea of the raw materials that are so essential for the batteries um and also the chips that you need to use yes 95% of the value of of a battery whether it's in your phone or in a car that's electric is the raw materials in an NCM cell that's Cobalt nickel and lithium you can mine it but you have to be processed you also need graphite to make a battery so those four essential materials plus the rare Earths that make the magnets to go in your electric motor all have to come from somewhere and how do you think about Ford's Independence on those we we decided to because we don't have the battery IP in the US so we went to South Korean and and Japanese companies and some Chinese companies and we said look we're going to buy your batteries but you raw material ecosystem has to be okay with us so we're not only going to require you to redo your ecosystem where you mine where you process but we're going to have governance around child labor corruption and all the other things that we need to inspect it's super important for our reputation we're a family 120 year old company I'm not going to take a risk on that um and so we went to friendly countries but the government hasn't really required that there's an incentive in the to do it that way but it's not required and with the Chinese coming here we're going to face this raw material and then semiconductors the same we have 1500 semiconductors in the average Ford not all of them are 2 nanometer Advanced AI chips many of them are just industrial chips that raise and lower your window digitally and or remotely operate your brake pedal and more and more of those are made in China um not for Ford but we have $8,000 wor the Silicon chips in the average Ford and there's a lot of pressure to save 10% to go to the cheapest player so um so will Americans pay more for semiconductors that are made in places that are friendly to the US I don't know so youve referenced the IRA a couple of times as you look at this upcoming presidential election how much does its outcome impact um impact your business uh you talk about regulations you talk about the need for for energy Independence for battery Independence how are you looking at this this presidential election cycle Okay so we've been in business 120 years we've seen a lot of different kinds of political leaders in our country um so Ford is very experienced with these Transitions and we have our agenda and we want to run our business according to a customer Choice um I don't want to get into the politics of of what's going to happen but clearly there'll be policy shifts we thought through a lot of those uh most of them I would say and I I think many of them will have big impacts on our journey to lower CO2 uh journey to you know digital product and I think we'll have to work through it like we always have for 120 years um and through all of this and all of this change and uncertainty you're focused on Innovation and you made the controversial decision and the Bold decision to create this Skunk Works plant in Southern California to innovate around lower cost EVS what led to that decision and can you give us any news about about these vehicles pricing what they're going to look like okay uh so Ford was one of the first movers after Tesla um to go into the EV business we decided to Electrify our three most iconic us comp uh Brands Mustang we created an electric Mustang utility our Transit van so we made an electric van and the F150 and um we learned a lot and we learned that if you just take your internal combustion Engineers supply chain and Manufacturing people and you ask them to make an EV it's not going to be a great EV what I mean is the customer facing part is great but we lose five billion dollar on our EVS you said five years to profitability how much are these new lower cost so that's the bad for example wiring harness all your vehicles have a wiring harness the traditional thinking in internal combustion world is Bid out your wiring harness to many different suppliers and then pick the lowest cost the highest quality supplier in an EV where the battery cost $30,000 and you're wiring wiring harness weighs 70 lbs extra that's $200 a battery so the math totally changes around the weight when you have a big expensive battery in your vehicle it's better to actually invest in super lightweight wiring so an EV requires completely different engineering to optimize around the smallest possible battery for the most affordability for customers aerodynamics huge imp act on an e way more than an ice vehicle because of the battery size so even the way you build the vehicle um it has to be radically rethought the way we're thinking about building a vehicle now is not do the body structure and then paint it and then put the seats and the powertrain in it build the right and the left and the front and the rear separately so the workers can go in and put seats and Carpeting and whatever else in the vehicle and you don't have to have large construction kind of assistant for them another one is put the computer in right after you paint it so it diagnose itself whether it's being built correctly no vision systems no looking over our workers shoulder to make sure they did a Fastener right it requires a completely different rethinking because the battery is so expensive so we created the Skunk Works two years ago with Alan Clark who was the chief engineer of the model y model 3 came from Tesla left Tesla to go to Ford and my badge doesn't work there it's totally separate from Ford and they've had a completely different approach and it looks like you know they're going to be successful we're going to bet the company on them it's a very American thing so when do you think we'll see some see what a vehicle out of there looks like and what kind of price point are you two and a half years okay and we're shooting for a $30,000 car um and to be profitable and uh we think the main competitors will be the new model Tesla 2 we think Tesla will come out with an affordable vehicle and the Chinese players from byd um and the state-owned Enterprises and the the yeah so that that's really a challenger project in the company I can't wait to see it now you've referenced the way that this new technology um is building these cars differently and I'm sure that AI is a big part of that I would assume also using AI as you build your traditional vehicles and the EVS you're also making I've had a conversation hosted a conversation this morning about AI in the workforce um with Mary Daly the the president of the San Francisco fed and also with viol kapor who's CE of Honeywell and there's no doubt that AI is going to continue to impact the way things are made how are you already deploying Ai and how do you see it changing your Workforce it's a huge impact to a company like Ford we have 200,000 employees emplo es around the world most of them make Vehicles every day um and so we have forecasting and you know shift planning and we have a lot of tasks that humans work every day to do that AI can allow those same people to kind of do different kind of work that's more valuable and I think the biggest impact in the first inning of this is going to be on our industrial system our supply chain identifying risk before humans can um uh helping us decide what is the best uh supplier for us um so much of the supply chain which is super strategic in a company like Ford a lot of that is just crunching numbers and making good decisions based on data and so um the way we make a car the supply chain and the engineering to me is the most impactful of course we have 12,000 software Engineers so we can allow AI to do a lot of the simple programming for us so that our software programs can do higher level things like diagnose problems in our vehicle software and then of course AI assistant in the vehicle you know the vehicles are not like your cell phone we have safety critical systems we have eyes off the road autonomy we have we already a number one en hands-free autonomy so all those safety warnings going on content it's it's really intimidating for a person AI system in the vehicle can make all that a lot easier and I'm not sure we want to just rely on Siri or whoever you use on your mobile phone so um AI will be in all parts of our business I think the biggest the biggest bet we'll make will be on the in the industrial system and do you see jobs being replaced by Ai No I think what we see is people doing different work because of AI you know we've been in business for 120 years my grandfather did on the floor and what what my grandfather would do today if he worked at Ford are totally different we've been using technology to move people's work statement shift it over time for a long time I think it's just another version of that but it's very powerful the other part of AI that we have to think about as a society is what are we going to do with all the data centers to process all this data our grid can't handle what we have today are we going to build 20% more power power plants to to handle all these AI data centers are the companies going to start to create their own power centers what do we feel as a society when a private company operates you know a private power power plant can the electrons in the batteries of these vehicles be used to offset some of the future Powertrain power plant buildout requirements I think so normally our customers charge at night late at night and I think the grid will hopefully get more intelligent well they'll they'll charge a 2 or three in the morning where the electrons are cheapest and then they're going to have a lot of electrons when there's Peak and we will we be able to sell those electrons back to the grid to reduce the requirement I I think we're going to have to struggle with problems like that with this AI explosion well the AI explosion is is part of this but what you're referencing here which you've talked about a little bit in the conversation earlier is this idea that your Ford EVS are different than the Tesla EV Tesla totally different you could charge but your EVS not only can you can you can you charge up your car but then you could also use the battery of the car to charge up a house yes um yes walk us through your philosophy around that and what you think that could mean for the grid and for infrastructure so we've just seen a big change in customers where they want their vehicle to be used stationary or to be a to be independent of the grid stationary meaning like I'm parked I'm sitting in my car the air conditioning is on and I'm catching up on email and I can do deep breathing or I can deep you know I can use it as a mini house when I'm camping or I can use it as a mobile office if I'm a plumber electrician um we see more and more people using their vehicles as the third space and also we see more people in American society worried about the grid stability and even worried about fresh water things like that so we really saw that and we started to realize that as we go electric even partial electric with hybrid we need to have bir directional charging and flow we we we should have a hybrid F-150 be able to power a job site or maybe a a tailgate or your house if you're in Texas and you lose energy for a couple weeks and that's one of the reasons why people are buying our hybrids the same for electric you know when Elon started I think he had no choice right there was no charging and a lot of people wanted to save um electrons in their house uh to Arbitrage the the the uh the grid so we created an energy business we decide not to do that so we decide to put bire charging on all of our EVS we're just waiting for the rest of Society to take keep up with that like what are you going to do if you can send your electrons out of your Ford um we got to get the utility company serious about this the grids start to get digital um but if you own an electric you know forward you're going to have that capability in the short term you'll have some you don't have to buy a $10,000 Honda generator the job site you go to any big job site now they're all these generators going they're expensive they're noisy just use your truck it's a lot simpler and the same for your house all the wealthy people I know they have you know these expensive generators we don't need them we can use our car to do that but how does the rest of the infrastructure need to evolve so it's not just a oneoff a guy or not oneoff but there's a you know the whole category people who can use their their trucks to power their job sitze but more big picture about um making sure that the grid is more energy efficient uh when there are blackouts or the like I think the ultimate thing is we have to make our grid intelligent and all the pieces that plug in and out of it have to be intelligent too it has to be a system um and we need to have some opinion leading utilities and Regulators um and and leaders policy leaders take this on I don't know where it's going to happen but I guarantee you somewhere in the us some somewhere in the world it may be China actually where this all gets integrated soon um and bidirectional charging I believe should be required for all electric vehicles why would you buy an electric vehicle and not be able to export the power that seems selfish frankly and I think it's it's something that should be required um for all companies making electric vehicles even for the future but the build out of that is going to take time and so someone has to go first someone has to do a pilot someone has to take it on it sounds like it's a priority for you it is we've been we've been we've been asking utilities to do this for two years we've gotten nowhere it's extremely frustrating for us you know Bill Ford is such a Visionary um we're so lucky to have him as chairman and he saw this many years before the company he did but we we've we had trouble getting that first rotation um before we open up to questions I want to ask you a little bit about self-driving sure and how you think about autonomous and the and the bets you've made and chosen not to make yes how you see it fitting into your future well when I became the CEO we were spending a billion dollars a year on Robo taxis uh a company the Argo AI that would build a vehicle that you know could pick up people and drop them off and we decided we actually was so expensive we did it with Volkswagen um and we decided to stop that two years ago and put kind of student body left into Highway level three which is autonomy the first operating domains will be on a sunny day in America um you're on the highway going 80 miles an hour and you could take your eyes off the road and we think that is a bigger problem statement for our society today and a bigger unlock for people than someone getting a robo taxi drive and there's a couple reasons for that first is the reality of with Robo taxis is we find that the technolog is limited so if it rains or snows or has any kind of problem you have to have a backup plan where you're not going to get a a dve a ride so if the robot taxis don't work you need a physical backup plan when the technology can't handle the weather and that felt like maybe that won't happen for a while um the second thing is many of the robot taxi companies have large warehouses filled with people remotely controlling the vehicle they're not really autonomous because someone has to watch them and we didn't like that we didn't like that sense that we would have to do that the third thing was we couldn't figure out removing the driver would create a business um it just didn't seem like a compelling business and the biggest thing was The Regulators we just couldn't see Regulators agreeing on having all these robot taxis around because we felt like it would add a lot of congestion they'd be roaming around if it wasn't highly regulated we would just be creating a lot of congestion and maybe even if they were all electric vehicles that's a different kind of problem we all felt like as a team that was just too many issues and it would be better to take all those technology people and go over here on Highway because we feel like that those miles people do every day and they're dangerous miles people are getting killed every day because of distractive driving on Highway and people don't drive we have adaptive cruise control that already does it we have lean keeping and now we have to have redundancy braking and steering and we have to have lar so you can get from 35 miles an hour or handsfree today uh which is you know to with a liar system you have to look a lot further ahead at 80 M an hour and so with with better sensors better AI processing better models we think in a couple years we should be able to offer the industry Highway autonomy so we think handsfree as a gateway to eyes off on the highway is a better unlock for customers hey we never I never thought when I was a young man entering the industry that our industry could give people 45 minutes back in their life that's pretty cool I never thought that could happen but it can happen on a highway trip on the way here to Aspen I'll take 45 minutes um before we open up to questions I just have to ask a quick question to you about Elon Musk you've referenced Tesla or I should say specifically about Tesla you've mentioned musk a couple of times mentioned Tesla U mentioned them as competition but also how you're taking a different approach in this next phase as you continue to transform forward how do you think about differentiation and competition with with them and the fact that Tesla's is number one in the EV space they are actually byd is now globally number one um Tesla's well first of all I think we'll all be very thankful that this journey was started by his vision um and he proved that we can make electric cars profitably that's really amazing um aside from all the you know he was incredibly gracious to allow Ford to join the supercharger Network and for our customers were number two as I said two and a half years for our customers to have access to the Tesla supercharge networks he didn't have to do that but he did it because he was a Missi driven person um and so I think we'll always be grateful for that cooperation uh I did my oped today I don't think he was super happy that it went in LinkedIn before X but anyways um so I I think look we have a different bet as a company than elon's BET our bet from learning from this first generation is that we will compete with him at the low end but we won't make commodity products I believe Ford's at its best when it makes work vehicles or passion Vehicles like Bronco Mustang F-150s um that's where we're at our best so I think we'll we'll be competitors but he's not in the commercial space and we dominate our our second place competitor GM isn't half as big as us and on the EV side we're even Moree of everyone they don't even have an electric van we're 75% of all electric vans in the US now so we dominate 40% of our electric commercial customers bu for charging systems so we're the supercharger of commercial um and so I don't think he'll go into that business and I think on the low end we'll be competing with each other um on all aspects full self-driving versus Ford's highway driving you know the vehicle itself but when you get in a Ford it won't feel like a Tesla it'll it'll feel differently and it'll feel like a place you may want to do work or spend a lot of time on fantastic well that's a great great note to to go to Q&A on and we have some questions down here we have some microphone and I appreciate characterizing remarks about the experiential part of driving yes oh okay about the experiential part of driving yes I just happened to watch a clip about uh from Ford versus Ferrari yeah and for those some of us who are like sort of passionate sports car like the drown shift it's not just going fast or slow yes so um how can you recreate that experience in an electric vehicle for those of us a Porche and the second part of it is if you don't have a Ford 150 or a Tesla power wall yes how you going to power your house buy an F-150 um so yeah so I think we learned a lot about propar board so you'll see in a lot of other vehicles um that that's the marketing name for exportable power so um look there's a lot of good news for us car you know I race Mustangs on the weekend and and uh and so I I love all that partial electrification remac came out with all electric Supercar there's been a few they they haven't sold any of them um so what clearly is happening is partial electric is the way to go high performance so I think what you're going to see is this a vehicle that's digital and partially electric where you use the full acceleration for electric but Regen to power that to repower it with a petrol engine that's super efficient I would argue even synthetic fuel man-made fuel we're starting to mess around with that most of the racing series are going to low carbon or zeroc carbon man-made fuel now um Formula 1 will go in 26 so you're going to see a lot of experimentation in performance applications with low carbon fuel um but a petrol engine using electric and then digital control the whole vehicle so you can control the damping braking biased everything from your phone so I want the max for stop and setting for or my Mustang or 911 that's going to happen soon I think that's the future and we shouldn't be scared of that because it's going to be as exciting as an all electric vehicle it's just a little different than what we thought it was going to be a couple years ago another question right there here their microphone sorry then I'll switch to the side of the room um we is a problem with EVS yes it is and Ford was brilliant with regard to the F-150 when you took 750 PBS out of the the F1 F150 yes by putting more aluminum in you mentioned first and second ending in EV do you see the possibility of taking 700 lbs out uh as batteries develop over time yes we have to you're absolutely right this is the Colin Chapman was right this is the enemy uh weight is the enemy so um this is the number one Focus other than Energy Efficiency it's like a that Apollo meeting when I go see my skunker team they have like a big board and they're they're measuring wattage and usage for every system in the vehicle to get the battery as small as possible but even beyond that we have to do things with body structures um uh all all the chassis systems uh we have to take massive weight out of it and and one of the big advantages to do that we used to build car with lots of pieces and when then we' weld the piece together and make a structural element this large unic casting is like a really big change and and you'll start to see components of the car look more like I hate to say this but like natural pieces they look more like insects than man-made things because of the lightweighting um New additive Manufacturing German Factory uh that is step one but I'm saying like the next couple steps will be Advanced Materials additive manufacturing with new body structures and new large castings that will be able to take a lot of weight out of the comp and complexity out of the vehicle um with a lot of aerodynamics Advanced Materials and smaller Vehicles we have to start to get back in love with smaller Vehicles it's super important for our society and for Ev adoption we are just in love with these monster vehicles and I love them too but it's a major issue with weight let's go to a question over on this side hi uh thanks for taking my question my name is Omar svia I teach automotive technology in San Diego at the high school and Community College level I'm also a founder of the San dieg uh sd.org we're collaborative where we connect Community uh Partners dealerships private sector shops uh and Educators together La Unified School District has nine Automotive programs remaining out of 85 since 1980 San Diego County has 20 high school programs five Community College Programs well aware of the issue yeah so you know the issue I do I hold a conference each year this last year in May we put together conference 150 Educators and uh we did 100% EV Focus we did Workshop where we replaced a Tesla battery incredible stuff we're we're making progress so my question is we need ideas for how to continue to get more Buy in from the local dealerships to support our programs and really be advocates for us understand yeah totally get it so yeah this is one of the biggest issues in our industry I don't want to get super technical but the the lack of technicians in our industry is going to be a big constraining factor and how to work on these digital electric vehicles it's totally different kind of work as you said as you know um and so I think the company has to take it on and we have to use our dealers and local communities to start doing these technology programs that the schools no longer do we have to displace you know because the schools have dropped them all I got it so so and these are good jobs I mean we we can $150,000 a year is Not Unusual at all so I think the burden falls on our company and frankly there's a good commercial reason behind it so uh it's very interesting you like it's like you literally were inside my meeting this morning because we were discussing this very thing I think we need about tech 10,000 technicians at Ford there you go um let's H go to a question down here hopefully we can squeeze in a couple more thank you looking far into the future as you perfect the self-driven auto mobile why will it be necessary for individuals to own a car on their own don't have to be yeah you're right it is a necessary um actually I think we're at first we started these subscription businesses but they really never went anywhere because it's still kind of individual ownership I I hope a market uh uh evolves enough where where there are financial markets sort of speak for PE for people the you go to Europe and the largest owner of vehicles are Fleet not individuals Fleet these company owns millions and millions of vehicles and they can fin there's fin financial markets and and see the reason why that's so important what you said is because the ReUse of the batteries see we need if you use individuals to own these vehicles you will limit the amount of reuse in the batteries unlike the past in recycling 99% of the raw materials can be reused and put into a brand new battery So eventually we'll we'll be able to get the industry will be big enough it'll be self-perpetuating we do not need to mine or process anything more because there's enough vehicles with the batteries in our society so Fleet ownership will be really important because that closed loop of recycling will be enabled by by that as well as making it affordable um and I I think we're starting to see that with fleets in Europe but we haven't really seen it in in the US Herz tried it didn't really work out because the collapse of pricing um in EVS really put a huge burden on their their balance sheet because they owned all those vehicles that were now 20% less valuable um but I still I think individual companies are starting to do it elon's talking about it with Tesla mean Robo taxi business and he's going to like start being the broker between individuals and and I I he's obviously hinting on on multiple owners in South America where Ford's been for over 100 years we have many people who buy vehicles in groups it's been going on for a hundred years it's C called consortio and we we have 20 or 30 people who buy a vehicle together and then they decide how to share it this is something that happens in the rest of the world just has it happen in America um and I think it's it's definitely something Ford will take on once we get the affordable vehicle and we get uh Advanced uh autonomy we then have the chance to start to own the fleet and then we could be the stewards of recycling and refreshing the vehicle that means we' re-engineer it differently so we can refresh it um upgrade the technology so we don't have to throw the metal away uh it's much more efficient if we had a multi an owner that owned the vehicle for its full life makes sense um let's squeeze in one more question there was one right here in the front ask question about the batteries yes um they're being made in China and what happens if we get in a trade war and China gets vindictive what happens to our domestic car business EV business so the the batteries 99% of the current batteries and tessels and Fords or or from South Korean and and Japanese technology but the materials that go into them are Chinese they're processed in China so you even if you a lithium mine in Argentina where I was born that all gets shipped to China for processing and then those companies put it in a battery um look it's it's a very serious topic um and that's why Ford is trying to do its part to diversify when we buy those batteries we insist that the that the mining and the processing is done in places that we like not all companies will do that and uh that means that there will be risk um and we're trading one risk for another risk but just because it's one another risk doesn't mean we shouldn't try I give Elon a lot of credit because he's actually processing nickel and lithium in Texas right now it's very small scale but he's learning how to actually do it in America um he doesn't promote it but it's a really important experiment for our country if we get in a big trade war in the Taiwan Straits a blockade of Taiwan whatever and it gets really ugly yes I'm actually less worried about that I'm more worried about data privacy and National Security with autonomous vehicles wow well we are out of time time but what a fascinating wide ranging conversation thank you so much Jim Carley thank you that was awesome thanks for watching stay updated about breaking news and top stories on the NBC News app or follow us on social media