Ford’s Fields Bullish on F-150 Launch, Tesla Model S Competitor

Ford CEO Mark Fields says the launch of the aluminum-bodied Ford F-150 pickup truck, arguably the most important vehicle to the automaker’s bottom line, continues to move ahead as planned and suggests a Tesla Model S-like vehicle would fit future product plans.

“We have driven the Model S,” Fields tells journalists and Wall Street analysts during a conference call today to detail Ford’s $835 million third-quarter profit.

“We’ve torn it down, we’ve put it back together (and) we drove it again. (We’re) very familiar with that product,” he says of the $70,000 luxury electric vehicle.

“It’s very consistent with our product strategy,” he adds. “One of our pillars in our product strategy is to have smart technology in our vehicles. We’re going to build on that.”

Fields, answering a question of whether the automaker has the know-how to potentially match the Model S someday, stops short of declaring a luxury EV for Ford’s future product portfolio. But he also makes clear if it were in the plans, Ford engineers could execute such a car.

“We have the talent,” Fields offers. “Do we need to continue to add and complement that talent? Absolutely.”

A piece of that talent acquisition will come as Ford grows its Palo Alto, CA, operations. The 2-year-old Ford research laboratory in the heart of tech-rich Silicon Valley, also home to Tesla, serves as an outpost for gathering intelligence on future mobility trends and software applications the automaker could add to existing vehicles.

Fields expects the unit will boom in the coming years, saying it will grow “significantly, so that we can attract that talent to our company.”

General Motors also operates a research lab in Silicon Valley, and former CEO Dan Akerson assembled a task force before he stepped down in January to study Tesla, a darling of Wall Street with stock trading higher than $230 per share.

Ford trades at $13 per share, while GM transacts at about $30.

Fields also says the important F-150 launch continues to move smoothly and on schedule. Ford is retooling assembly plants in Kansas City, MO, and Dearborn, MI, to accommodate the new pickup. But it’s a delicate balance between facility downtime, keeping dealer lots stocked with the current model and teaching workers how to handle and assemble its revolutionary aluminum body panels.

“We are absolutely on plan,” Fields says of the launch, which should put the ’15 F-150 on dealer lots by the end of the year. “We are exactly where we expected to be.”

Fields remarks should be welcome news to investors, because the F-150 boasts industry-leading profits of 8%-9% per unit and delivers to Ford some of its highest transaction prices.

Less encouraging to investors was Ford’s third-quarter profitability, down 34% on costs associated with launching the new F-150. But it still marked the 21^st consecutive quarter of profitability for the Dearborn automaker and beat analysts’ expectations.

Other factors contributing to the decline in net income included continued lumpiness in Europe, where Ford took a charge of $160 million, and sluggishness in South America. While sales were up 5% in Asia, profit contribution from the region in the July-September period tumbled 62% as Ford ramped production and new-product rollouts in China.

Field warns results from China could be uneven in the fourth quarter, too. Ford reported its first drop in monthly sales this year in China in September, down 0.2%.

“As you look at the remainder of the year, we will be down a bit,” he says of China, but also warns any hiccup would be considered not “a pause,” but rather “a pit stop” as Ford aggressively grows its business there.

Ford revenue in the third quarter fell 2.5% to $34.9 billion on global sales of 1.5 million vehicles.

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