Rewind: CEO Jim Farley on Ford's EV gamble

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**Nilay Patel** (1:43)
Hey everybody, it's Nilay. You might remember last year, I took a break from Decoder after we had a baby. In my place, we had an excellent slate of guesthouse, and we've been working hard to bring you those episodes in full video since we launched our official Decoder YouTube channel. Today, we're featuring a really great interview with Ford CEO Jim Farley, conducted by my very good friend Joanna Stern. Joanna was still working for the Wall Street Journal as a columnist when she did this interview, but she since left the Journal and launched her own new media company, New Things. We actually had her on as a guest talking about her new company earlier this year. We'll link that episode in the show notes. Joanna and Jim talked back in September of last year, right after Ford announced a major new manufacturing process for its electric car line-up. Since then, a lot has happened. The company took a massive $19.5 billion write-down on its EV operation, discontinued the all-electric F-150 Lightning, and lost EV and software chief Doug Field. The Verge has done a lot of stellar reporting on what's going on inside Ford as it tries to pull off its transformation. We'll drop those links in the show notes as well. But back in September, as you'll hear in this interview, Farley very much saw the future of EVs at Ford as a gamble that would require some big risks. We're obviously now seeing just how big those risks actually were. Joanna also pulled some exclusive news out of Jim at the time, including some really telling quotes about Trump's terrorist policy, competing with Chinese EVs, and the company's stance on Apple CarPlay.
You knew there was going to be some Apple CarPlay in this one, didn't you? Okay, Joanna Stern of New Things interviewing Ford CEO Jim Farley. Here we go.

**Joanna Stern** (3:18)
Jim Farley, you are the CEO of Ford Motor Company. Welcome back to Decoder.

**Jim Farley** (3:23)
Great to be here with you, Joanna.

**Joanna Stern** (3:25)
So thank you for coming on my show. Obviously, this is not my show. This is Nilay's show, but I wanna give you some background here. So I listen to Decoder all the time, and I love his car CEO interviews.
But often I find myself saying, Nilay, why didn't you ask that question? So when he asked me to do this, I said, that's it. I'm going to bring on car CEOs, and I'm going to ask the questions I want.

**Jim Farley** (3:50)
I see.

**Joanna Stern** (3:52)
And so you were back on the show in May, 2021 Things have considerably changed in the world, in technology, in the country, at Ford. And I wanna talk about all of those things. But something also changed for me. In 2023, I got a Mustang Mach-E, as you know, I leased one.
And that lease is up next summer.

**Jim Farley** (4:18)
Ah, I'll be reading about your decision process.

**Joanna Stern** (4:22)
Well, that's gonna inform a lot of this conversation because I wanted to give you the chance to be the world's best car salesman to the most annoying customer. And so I think that's just gonna set a lot of the backdrop of this conversation here.