on cc today in response to question, ford has bought a model s and driven it. they took it apart and put it back together and drove it again. they are confident that they can build it. thought this was funny. issue isnt can you build it but if you can design and engineer one. their stating that it drove again seemed funny. a successful experiment in model kit building
I replied in the News thread, but I think my comment is more applicable to the Investors forum.
It's telling to me that a CEO of a company would spend even 1 second in a quarterly conference call discussing company performance, to talk about how the CEO's company could do something similar to what some competitor is doing if they wanted to, but don't (want to that is).
The only competitor / competition that a CEO should be talking about during a conference call is somebody that you compete with broadly and deeply. Intel and AMD, Apple and Samsung, Ford and GM. And only to talk about how existing products compare better and worse.
Talking about a pipsqueak competitor, at least based on unit volume, who has a product that you have nothing like, just emphasized what you can't do in the first place. Saying you can disassemble and reassemble it strongly suggests that Ford employs mechanics and engineers. That's a relief.
More completely, either Tesla is a full competitor of Ford's, in which case the air time is reasonable. Also in this case, the comments made by Ford's CEO emphasizes what Ford doesn't do and Tesla does, instead of emphasizing what Ford does and Tesla doesn't (offer a full range of cars, cheap to expensive, range of use cases).
Or Tesla isn't really a competitor of Ford's (which I believe to be the case today), in which case Ford's CEO should spend exactly as much time talking about Tesla as they talk about Ferrari or any other boutique manufacturer that isn't really a competitor of Ford's. In this case, an EV related question provides an opportunity to talk about the overall scale of EV's to Ford's overall business, or where the CEO sees the EV contribution to the product mix in the future, and on and on. But the one thing Ford's CEO doesn't do, period, is talk about how the company could compete with some pipsqueak if they felt like it, but just doesn't feel like it.
Not that I'm a CEO, and not that I've ever done a quarterly conference call, but my immediate thought is to figure out how I'd have turned the question into one about EV's in general, and from there into a discussion of what Ford products there are, what Ford IS actually doing, and what Ford DOES actually have in the work and is ready to talk about.
This comment makes me happy I'm not an investor in Ford - as a shareholder, hearing my CEO talk this way would make me crazy. (Or sell).