Didn't see this posted yet.
Ford considers building Tesla-like vehicle
Fields [Ford CEO Mark Fields] said Ford could build a car similar to the Tesla Model S and has the engineering and manufacturing sophistication to do so. "We drove it. We took it apart. We put it back together and we drove it again," he said.
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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.
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).