to focus on is how do we move away from petroleum-based sources to either recycled content or renewable or plant-based content.
X: How big is the sustainability group at Ford?
JV: Our group is very small. We have a handful, maybe a half dozen, or six to 10 people. The reason our group is so small is that we come up with the strategies, but then we have the product development organization, our sourcing organization, manufacturing organization, and they take those strategies and implement them in their operations.
X: So you’ve been developing these guidelines, what’s next?
JV: The roadmap could go on almost indefinitely. What we need is to move from is a majority of our products running on fossil fuels to a majority of our products running on non-fossil fuels, right? It’s got to be either electric or hydrogen. That’s the progression of where we’re going.
Beyond that, we’re talking more about the fact that Ford wants to be a mobility company. So we might want to start looking at businesses that are not just producing cars and trucks. This is long term. As we look out into the future, you know, there is more and more congestion. The planet can’t just continue to accept more and more cars and trucks. So how do we want to be in the mobility business? Maybe [it could be] making our cars more effective in terms of talking to each other, or maybe even getting into some ancillary businesses. That’s much longer term, but we’re looking at that as well.
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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow
In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here.
Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.
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