Ford CEO Expresses Interest In Working With Trump; Says Less Regulation Is Key To Saving U.S. Jobs
By Tyler Durden
With Carrier setting the precedent for what future negotiations with the Trump administration may look like, Ford CEO Mark Fields has come forward to layout potential policy changes that would be important to preserving auto jobs in the United States. Not surprisingly, per an interview with Bloomberg, Fields’ opening “ask” focused on less restrictive fuel economy standards, new currency-manipulation rules to promote free and fair trade and corporate tax reform.
Ford Motor Co. was a target of Donald Trump’s criticism on the campaign trail for building cars in Mexico, and now that Trump will be president, Ford said it’s willing to work with him to keep jobs in the U.S. — provided Trump puts the right policies in place, according to the automaker’s chief executive officer.
“We will be very clear in the things we’d like to see,” Mark Fields said in an exclusive interview Friday at Bloomberg offices in Southfield, Michigan.
Among them, according to Fields: currency-manipulation rules to promote free and fair trade, tax reform and safety guidelines for autonomous vehicles.
Fields said that Ford plans to lobby the new president to soften U.S. and state fuel-economy rules. They hurt profits by forcing automakers to build more electric cars and hybrids than are warranted by customer demand, he said.
“In 2008, there were 12 electrified vehicles offered in the U.S. market and it represented 2.3 percent of the industry,” Fields said in the interview. “Fast forward to 2016, there’s 55 models, and year to date it’s 2.8 percent.”
Of course, Ford was a frequent target of Trump’s during the 2016 campaigning cycle after they announced plans to move their small car production to a new facility in Mexico. That said, Fields noted that Trump’s policies “in terms of his economic policies, whether it’s tax reform or otherwise” have already gone a long way toward influencing Ford’s decision to maintain the production of the Lincoln MKC at a plant in Louisville, KY.
After the Nov. 8 election, Trump phoned Executive Chairman Bill Ford to discuss the carmaker’s plan to move manufacture of the Lincoln MKC sport utility vehicle to Mexico from a plant in Louisville, Kentucky, Fields said. The discussion helped convince Ford to keep building the Lincoln in the U.S.
Trump influenced the decision “because of what he’s talking about in terms of his economic policies, whether it’s tax reform or otherwise,” Fields said.
As our readers are certainly aware, North American auto OEMs and their tier 2 suppliers have been in a race to move auto production across borders to low-cost countries (LCCs) for the past couple of decades as soaring wages, pension and OPEB obligations, high taxes and punitive regulations have made production in the U.S. all but impossible.
Of course, the groundwork for the shift of auto production to Mexico was laid with the passage of NAFTA in 1993 by former President Bill Clinton (a fairly inconvenient fact that Hillary probably regrets pretty heavily right now). Since then, Mexico has …read more
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