Transcript of Podcast: Interview with Ford VP

The podcast interview can be found here.

Erin: This is Erin Kotecki Vest with BlogHer.com and today I am joined by Ford Motor Company’s Susan Cishke and I am very excited about this cause as many of you know, I have been, oh, blogging all about the auto industry and my Detroit roots at BlogHer and at my own site, and this is a topic that’s very close to my heart with my Chrysler grandfather and all of my Ford family and friends and all of those at GM within my family as well and friends from the metro Detroit area. So thank you so much for joining us today, Susan.

Sue: Well, thank you. It’s just great to be able to talk about an industry that I’ve been involved with a long time and really have a lot of fondness for as well.

Erin: Now Susan, your title over at Ford is Group Vice-President, Sustainability, Environment, and Safety Engineering. Why don’t you just let people know a little bit about what exactly that means and what you do for Ford?

Sue: Okay. Other than being really long on my business cards, really it involves a lot of different things. One, in the first statement there in sustainability, my job is to really integrate the sustainability and the way we define that is finding the balance between the environment, the social and the economic needs of the future, and doing that today so that we can be around for the next 100 years. And part of that is to make sure we integrate those sustainability goals in every part of the business that we are involved in and that we establish what our long term sustainability goals for CO2 is and then decide how does that product plan develop so that we set aside those goals. So that’s one aspect of it.

But then from the environment and the safety perspective, my job is to help forecast the rules, the regulatory requirements from all over the world that our products have to meet and our plants have to meet from an environmental standpoint, and then help with the teams here to develop products that will satisfy all those requirements. And then after the fact, make sure that we are complying and if we have vehicles that have issues and we have to recall them, then it’s my job to determine when that’s necessary to do that.

So really it covers from the very, very beginning of concept to the end. And in the case of the facilities, it could cover 100 years or so because it’s plants that we built in 1925 we’re responsible for and that’ll be around for the next 50 years as well. So really an exciting job because it touches every aspect of the company.

Erin: One of the things I’m most consistently confronted with when I talk about the auto industry, seems to be a lot of these misconceptions that, and as one of our readers wrote, that they seem to think that buying American isn’t good because they think that they’re eons behind imports when it comes to fuel efficient cars or the green and eco hybrids and things of that nature.

And one of the things I’m constantly confronting is those myths and I know that Ford is on the leading edge of a lot of that stuff. So I think to start what I would love to do is have you let people know as part of your role, what is happening at Ford and what are they doing to really be a leader in this area.

Sue: Oh, that’s a great question because I think there’s a lot of misperceptions out there in terms of our performance in a number of different fronts. One, from a quality standpoint, Ford is at par with the best in the business, Toyota, Honda. There’s nobody that can hold a candle to us on quality. So that was always the reason that people would say, “We’re not sure we want to buy American cars because the quality and the durability and the reliability isn’t as good.” And I gotta tell you that we are right in the top of the game there.

Second is safety. And from a safety perspective, Ford has more five star vehicles. This is how the government rates vehicles in their crash testing, and more of the top safety picks rated by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety than any other company. So we’re really proud of our quality badge, our safety badge, and then on the environmental side, we’ve got an awful lot to be proud of as well.

We’ve set goals to be at the top of our game on every segment of the vehicle that we produce. We are the largest domestic producer of hybrids and our new products that we’re launching are just fantastic. We’re this year launching a Ford Fusion hybrid that will be America’s most fuel efficient midsized sedan. It’s gonna deliver at least 39 miles per gallon, which is six miles per gallon better than the Toyota Camry hybrid. And that we have I4 engines, it’s our four cylinder engine, in our Fusions that deliver 33 miles per gallon, which is at least three miles per gallon better than the Honda Accord or two miles than – behind the Camry.

But what’s exciting about all this, and I can go over vehicle by vehicle how we do, we have a strategy of delivering affordable fuel economy, and what that means is we’re working on improving the internal combustion engine that – today’s gasoline engine, and it’s called Eco Boost. And I don’t know if you’ve heard about that, but it’s just –

Erin: I have, but I know –

Sue: Yeah, that’s good.

Erin: A lot of other people haven’t.

Sue: Right. Well, what Eco Boost is is it’s a smaller engine. It’s downsized. It’s turbo charged and it’s direct injection. And you might say, “Well, what does that all mean?” Basically it means I can give you almost 20 percent better fuel economy and give you the same or better performance. So for a person who’s driving the vehicle, they’re gonna get this huge boost in fuel economy and at the same time not give up anything.

They’re gonna feel this great, fun to drive vehicle. The beauty of this is that we are gonna be able to do this on 500,000 engines a year starting this year, this 2009 model, or 2009 calendar year for the MKS, our Lincoln vehicle, and the Ford Flex. And this is gonna be great because we’ll be able to, over the next few years, impact millions of vehicles as opposed to small, you know, specialty fleets of 1,000 here or 2,000 here or whatever.

So overall when I was talking about our sustainability plan, I think the way you could sum it up for Ford is fuel economy is extremely important for us. We want to deliver affordable fuel efficiency and still deliver advanced technologies when we can drive the cost down and make them affordable.

So we’ve got hybrids today. We’re working on plug in hybrids. We’re working on battery electric vehicles. You know, we cover the whole gamut of the product development, but I don’t think you could say that we’re second to anybody in terms of our research and development on these things and we’re really proud of the accomplishments that we have today.

Erin: That’s one of the questions that continues to occur here from our community members at BlogHer. They want to know what the time frame is to produce that all electric vehicle.

Sue: Well, we have made – we’re gonna do a lot more in Detroit – in the North America International Auto Show in Detroit, which is coming up in January. We’re gonna discuss in detail what our plan is, but we have kind of teased it out a bit that says we’re gonna be bringing to market by 2012 a family of hybrids, plug in hybrids and battery electric vehicles and we’re gonna show how this all works together because it really is a strategy that’s all tied together, not just one or two here or there.

And we are gonna be partnering with – well, we’ll be announcing this at the show, that we are gonna be delivering a full battery electric vehicle in a van type vehicle for commercial fleet use in 2010 and a battery electric vehicle in a sedan in 2011. And so what we’ll be unveiling at the show is really our whole plan of how we put all these things together.

In the meantime though, your listeners might be aware of some of the partnerships we’ve created, again, to help commercialize and drive down the cost of these new technologies. We partnered with Southern California Edison, who is a utility supplier, and we’ve been working with them on plug in hybrids now for about a year and a half. We have 20 vehicles that we’re working with them on. So they understand the grid. We understand the vehicle and how do we make these things really work well together.

So we’ve been out there doing a lot of interesting things. Also, with the Electric Power Research Institute in New York, we'll be delivering vehicles to a number of different power suppliers and we’ve been working with others to really figure out for the future how do we change the business model so we can make these vehicles more affordable.

Erin: Absolutely, because that has been one of the challenges is that they’re not exactly cheap.

Sue: Yes, you know, the one thing that people should remember too is with this new technology we’re gonna be pretty dependent on batteries, and we don’t have a good supply base of people building batteries for automotive use that are these new batteries, the lithium ion batteries, in the United States. And we want to make sure that we’re not trading our dependence on foreign oil from the Middle East to eventually trading our energy security to batteries being produced in Asia. And so we need to develop this battery base in the U.S.

And that’s something that we’re very interested in working with the Obama administration on is helping to get that seed money for suppliers to build plants here and help develop it because the whole battery industry is really, especially in lithium ion, is generated from the consumer electronics, and most of that’s in Japan or in China or in Korea, and we haven’t really hit the center of confidence here.

Erin: Absolutely. We’ve talked about fuel efficiency and we’ve talked about the possibility for these electric and plug ins, but one of the things that Green and Clean Mom brings up over at BlogHer is the car south, all these plastics in every vehicle, and she has a lot of concerns about how eco friendly or unfriendly that is. And she would like to know what you guys are doing to make the things like the soybean seeds and things like that a reality in the long term in all of Ford’s vehicles and how you can clean up the actual car itself.

Sue: What I’d like to start off by saying is we have recyclability goals in our vehicle. Eighty-five percent of our vehicle is recyclable, so that’s a pretty big number and we continue to drive even further improvements.

We’ve done a lot in taking out hazardous materials from our vehicles. We don’t use any mercury in our vehicles anymore. We took the lead out of the lead wheel weights that people use to balance the tires. We’ve gone after a lot of different chemicals and things. So we really have a concentrated effort on that.

At the same time, Ford has been a leader in developing these new materials that are environmentally friendly, including the soy foam, and there’s other materials that we’re working on to develop substitutes for plastics that are more natural products that are renewable. And also what we’ve been doing is even encouraging biofuel for that matter and trying to help develop the biofuel industry because that is also a way that we can be less dependent on oil.

So we’ve been doing a lot of these things and all of it is driven by our goal for sustainability. And if you remember, I was saying we find that right balance between the environment, the economics, and the social aspect of it, and so what we want to show people is you can be environmentally friendly and still do it in a cost effective way. And that’s always the goal that we’re looking at. And we do have introducing these new materials in a lot of our vehicles, what our overall goal is, you start in one model, you learn from that, make sure that you can develop that well, and then spread it across the other models.

Erin: That kind of ties in nicely to a question we got from our CEO at BlogHer, Lisa Stone, in relation to the environmental products as well as feeling a need to kind of help the auto workers in what’s been going on in the economic crisis. And she’d like to know what consumers can do to help Detroit auto workers even as they insist on products that suit their wallets and the environment.

Sue: Well, buy a Ford, number 1. That would help us. Rush right now down to the dealership and buy a car.

Erin: Buy American and buy Ford. It works and actually does work. I saw that that was a write up in The Free Press today too that the number 1 thing you can do is to actually buy American.

Sue: Right. I think it’s important for people to understand how important the auto industry is to our economy and I know there’s been so much news in the past and everybody weighs in with their opinions, but we effect about one out of ever six jobs in the U.S., and we’re about almost 25 percent of the economy.

So in the times right now when the economy is pretty fragile, we’ve gotta just make sure that we don’t do anything that makes it even worse. And in particular, we’ve made it clear that from a liquidity standpoint, Ford is doing fine, but if anything happens to Chrysler or GM, it affects us because of the supply base and the connectivity to the supply base. Excuse me.

So we have to make sure that there’s a path here that makes sure we do orderly adjustments and not just let everything just happen. And I guess that’s kind of the code word for we gotta make sure that there is some bridge loan or something that helps Chrysler and GM because it would pull us down as well just because it would crash all the suppliers. And then you think of all the dealers and their families and everybody who’s affected, even just in the surrounding communities, all the people who depend on the auto industry.

So I think that just we should have that overall awareness. We have been working very hard to restructure our company. We’ve been doing this since 2006 and we’ve taken over $5 billion out of the cost structure itself from 2005 to 2008, through the end of this year. We’ve streamlined our brand. We have Ford and Lincoln and Mercury our focus and we’re looking at possibilities for Volvo, and we’ve made those announcements.

We sold the Land Rover and Jaguar and our Aston Martin. But we’re really focused on what we need to do and I think that’s what’s so different for us because we’ve been working on this for a while and we were doing so well. And the first quarter we made a profit and then the whole credit market collapsed and it was kind of a perfect storm because the gas prices went up and so people were concerned about buying SUV’s and trucks. The credit market crashed, so people were worried about their homes being foreclosed as well as not being able to get resources to credit to buy a vehicle. And then the credit market was crunched for the dealers too so that they couldn’t floor plan the vehicles and they’re having difficulty keeping their businesses alive.

So, all these things were happening at the same time. And it’s really too bad because we – like I said, we’re well on our way to having all these things kind of come together for us and now we’re all facing this really difficult economic times.

Erin: Absolutely. One of the things that inevitably comes up when you have a discussion with BlogHer is women in the workplace. We are BlogHer, after all.

Sue: Yeah, I love that.

Erin: Brandy from Ask Patty would love to know how you first became interested and began your career in the automotive industry because it is such a male dominated – when you think cars, you don’t necessarily think women. Let us know how this all came about for you.

Sue: Well, I’m an engineer and I’ve always been interested in math and science when I was a kid growing up. So when I went to figure out what to major in, I thought, “Well, maybe I would go into computers or maybe I would teach or do something along that line.” And I was really fortunate that a counselor at the college said, “Why don’t you try engineering if you like math and science? Really engineering is making science kind of work in the every day life and helping people.”

And I said, “Oh, I don’t know. It kind of sounds like it might be too hard.” But I thought well, you know, I should give this a shot because maybe there is a role here.” And I loved it because the first introductory class I could see how this was all practical. It was how do you use these other tools and you could really make a difference. And I think I’m pretty much a people person and I thought this was a good way to be able to use math and science really to help people.

I had an engineer – I had an uncle who was an engineer and I didn’t really know what he did, but anybody who grows up in the Detroit area, you’re somehow connected to the auto industry, you know.

Erin: Yeah, you are.

Sue: Yeah, it’s kind of a logical move. I hired in at Chrysler actually and went through the Chrysler Institute, got my master’s in mechanical engineering. And I worked there for almost 25 years and then made the move over to Ford in January of 2001. And the reason I came to Ford is I was so impressed with their dedication to safety and the environment, and that was the areas that I was working in and felt like I could really make a difference here. And it’s been a fantastic experience.

You’re right. There’s not a lot of women in the auto industry, but when I first entered in, there were very few at higher levels, and so I can say now that when I look around and attend meetings, I’m not the only one in the room. There’s other women there. But it is still pretty much a male oriented business, however, over 80 percent of the people or 80 percent of the purchases are influenced by women. Either they’re buying vehicles or they are influencing their families. And so it’s so important that we have women at all levels of the company making decisions because that reflects our buyers.

Erin: I know. When I visited Ford this summer I had met a lot of your research and development team, and the majority of those lead scientists over there were women and that was very nice to see.

Sue: Yeah. Especially, the ones working on the environmental projects, the soy foam and different things like that –

Erin: Yeah.

Sue: We have a lot of very passionate people at Ford that really believe in what they’re doing. And they have families. They want to make sure their cars are safe for their families. They want to make sure they’re good for the environment. So it really has been a great company to work for.

Erin: Jody from Askpatty.com would love to know if you got – what your biggest challenge is as a woman working for Ford.

Sue: I think there’s lots of stereotypes regarding management style and just I think it’s always different. I mean I think I do approach problems differently than some of my male colleagues. So you really want to get your voice heard. And I was in a unique situation because I came from outside the company to Ford. And so there is always this – had been of you kind of like if you were homegrown, you know, that you had been in Ford for a long time that it was, you know, better, but now thing are so different and change and and I’ve gotta say that with Alan Mulally as our CEO and president, Alan is a very inclusive atmosphere and very much a team oriented work group, and same with Bill Ford. I work for both of them and it’s been great because everybody’s opinion is respected and we really try to be including everybody in those decisions. So I think my biggest challenge is – it has nothing to do with being a woman. It really has to do with, you know, trying to move as quickly as we can on these really tough environmental problems and trying to find the solutions that really make the world better.

Erin: Thank you so much for joining us today, Susan. I know our time is running short. Susan Cishke of Ford Motor Company. She’s the Group Vice-President, Sustainability, Environment, and Safety ngineering. Again, thank you so much.

Sue: Thank you. It was really a pleasure.