Hello, and welcome to Decoder! This is Nilay Patel’s show about big ideas and other problems. I am not Nilay Patel, though I have long wanted to be him. I am Joanna Stern, the senior personal technology columnist at The Wall Street Journal, author of the upcoming book I AM NOT A ROBOT (releasing spring 2026), and, once upon a time, a cofounder of The Verge. I’m the last Monday guest host filling in for Nilay while he’s out on parental leave with his adorable new son, and I’m very excited to be talking today to Ford CEO Jim Farley. I’m a longtime Decoder listener and my favorite episodes are car episodes. I might not own a gas-powered Mustang convertible like Nilay — I’m not cool enough — but I did, in fact, lease my first EV, a Ford Mustang Mach-E, back in 2023. I think car CEOs are currently facing some of the most fascinating and complex challenges in both tech and business. Listen to Decoder, a show hosted by The Verge’s Nilay Patel about big ideas — and other problems. Subscribe here!So when I was asked to guest host the show I said, “That’s it, car CEOs.” And Jim was at the top of the list. Jim was on this show once before — his first appearance was in May 2021. And, well, a whole lot has changed in the past four years. Actually, a whole lot has changed in the last four months. The second Trump administration’s barrage of tariffs, trade wars, and a whole lot more, just to name a few. For Ford, it’s an especially critical moment. Last month, the company announced what it calls the Ford Universal EV Platform, an all-new manufacturing process that the company is calling a “Model T moment” for EVs. That’s because it should, in theory, allow Ford to produce cheaper EVs in a more efficient manner than it does with its current lineup, including my Mach-E. You will hear Jim say “last week” a few times — that’s because we taped this episode in August just after their announcement. It’s also not just tariff troubles for Ford. There’s the general weakening of demand for EVs in the US, the loss of the federal tax credit, and rising competition from low-cost Chinese competitors like BYD and Xiaomi.One thing I love about talking to Jim is that he’s honest about it all. You’ll hear him say in plain terms that China is, in some respects, miles ahead of the West when it comes to some parts of its EV industry. And this major multibillion-dollar gamble on a Ford Universal EV Platform isn’t a done deal. You’re going to hear him say the word “risk” quite a lot in this conversation, and how this major manufacturing and strategy pivot could very well fail. Jim had quite a lot to say about rebuilding the manufacturing base of blue-collar workers here in the US to compete with China — and even AI. Plus, he didn’t shy away from what he’d like to see from the Trump administration on tariffs. He says specifically, “We’re just asking for a fair fight.” And don’t worry, I didn’t forget to do my best Nilay impression with a bunch of Decoder questions. Is Ford considering Apple’s CarPlay Ultra? (His answer is so great on that one.) How does Jim Farley make decisions? And, most importantly, do I stick with the Ford Mach-E when my lease is up next summer? I also couldn’t let Jim go without hitting him with a special call-in question from an old friend who’s technically not supposed to be working right now. I think you’re going to really like that one. Okay, hopefully you’re in your car listening to this: Ford CEO Jim Farley, here we go.This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. Jim Farley, you are the CEO of Ford Motor Company. Welcome back to Decoder.Great to be here with you, Joanna.Thank you for coming on my show. Obviously, this is not my show, this is Nilay’s show, but I want to give you some background. I listen to Decoder all the time, and I love Nilay’s 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.”I see.[Laughs] So you were last on the show in May 2021. Things have changed considerably in the world, in technology, in the country, and at Ford. I want to talk about all of those things. But something also changed for me. In 2023, I got a Mustang Mach-E. I leased one.Thank you.And that lease is up next summer.Ah, I’ll be reading about your decision process.Well, that’s going to 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. I think that’s just going to set a lot of the backdrop of this conversation.[Laughs] I love it.Last month, you said at a press conference that the Mach-E is not so great, that it’s not the future of Ford. Why should I stick with a Ford EV next time?Well, we just won the revised Model Y versus Mach-E drive evaluation by a pretty respected magazine. I’m still pretty proud of the Mach-E. We knew what we knew then (five years ago) and we now know what we know now. Those are, as you said, two different things.I would say that in the second inning of product development, Ford really understood the opportunity to serve the EV market more fully than we did several years ago and we executed a product with the right approach based on those lessons. That’s with the consumer, because we’ve learned what consumers are willing to live with and not — like charging on the fly — as well as where in the market Ford should participate and put its limited resources. I think you’re going to find that the Ford EV product range will be much sharper, more specific, and more valuable to customers than it was when you last shopped.Let’s dig into the news you just announced, which is that you have something called Ford Universal EV Platform. What is that, and when is it coming? More specifically for me, will it be out next August, and will I be able to get that kind of new Ford versus an upgrade to my Mach-E?You’ll learn a lot more about the first product. It’s a platform that will be out in 2027. We learned so much from the Mach-E. We’ve been number two to Tesla. We’re a long way behind them, but we’re number two in the US market in EV sales. EV sales aren’t the most important metric, but it does give you an indication that Ford has learned a lot and has served a lot of wonderful customers like you. We have all of the data coming off the vehicle, so we have learned a lot about customers.We believe the platform that we shared in Kentucky is a breakthrough approach for developing and delivering an affordable, electric platform to customers, where we’ll develop and launch several vehicles over the subsequent few years and show that we can have a profitable vehicle that’s sustainable in terms of the company’s resources and made in the US. But in order to compete with the likes of BYD, who we think are among the best in the world, we had to completely reinvent the platform for the customers.There’s a lot to that. I’m sure we’ll get into it, but in short, the evolution revolution of our thinking was to develop a vehicle for manufacturability, to radically reduce the cost and the complexity of the vehicle with all new thinking that is not embedded in a traditional car company. To do that, we needed all new talent, and we needed them to be separate from Ford, separate from our IT solutions that we used to develop and release parts, and separate from a philosophy standpoint about how to radically simplify the vehicle. This is all to really get back to the basics of Ford and Henry Ford’s idea of a “universal car.”Our first body style will be a pickup, but it’s really not a pickup. I would say it’s a new silhouette. What I mean by that is that it has more room than a RAV4, the best-selling passenger car in the US. That doesn’t include its frunk and pickup truck bed. It is very fast, it’s rear-wheel drive, it’s super fun to drive, and it has a digital experience that no one’s seen — at least that we’ve seen — even in China. The digital experience is quite different for customers. I think the whole package is something that has not been offered in the US or anywhere else to date. I think this first product is quite revolutionary.And this first product is what you’re going to have out in 2027?Yes, exactly.You’ve mentioned BYD, which is a Chinese competitor that is making low-cost, very high-tech EVs. Here in the US, you’re up against Tesla and GM. You mentioned that you have the second-best-selling EV, but GM seems to have had some real luck with the Equinox EVs, and they’re quickly taking off because of price.Absolutely.Is the move to put this new platform out against this backdrop enough? Is it enough to compete both here and in China?For us, it could be. Globally, no,, it’s not enough. In North America, it’s absolutely the right strategy, but it’s not our complete strategy. GM has 14 nameplates, we have three. We came out with our vehicles four or five years ago, and it’s coming out with them now. So, our product cycle is completely different. What I mean by that is we’re about to launch our second generation of products, and it has its first 14 out now. I hope it outsells us. If I were GM with 14 nameplates, it should easily scale. I personally didn’t think we would be number two for three years with our simple lineup, but it seems to have worked so far in the first inning.The competitive reality is that the Chinese are the 700-pound gorilla in the EV industry. There’s no real competition from Tesla, GM, or Ford with what we’ve seen from China. It is completely dominating the EV landscape globally and more and more outside of China. They have 20 million units locally, and about 11 million are EV or [extended-range EVs], So half that market. We’re barely at a million vehicles here in the US. That’s one tenth of China’s volume. Europe’s only twice as big as us, so that’s maybe only one fifth. China’s successful for good reason. It has great innovation at a very low cost. For example, it bet on [lithium iron phosphate] technology, not these expensive lithium batteries. There’s hundreds of companies, and they’re all sponsored by their local governments, so they have huge subsidies. It’s new brands. It’s BYD and Geely, and companies like Nio and Xiaomi, many of which have never been in the car business before, and that’s a big advantage for them. In China, the brands that are winning are indigenous brands. They’re not global automotive companies, they’re really Chinese companies. To beat them, we need a completely different approach. It’s not the number of vehicles you have or the price you offer the customer. Everyone’s going to have affordable EVs. If you sell an affordable EV in the US for $30,000 but it costs you $50,000 to make, you could say you have an affordable EV, but that’s not a sustainable business.Three or four years ago, we saw this affordable customer duty cycle changing with our sales. It became very obvious to me that we had to go outside of Ford, create this maverick group, give them resources and stay out of their way, but make sure that they deliver on a completely new approach because the Chinese are so formidable, they have so much support from the government, and their customers have such a high expectation for the digital experience that an incremental approach from Mach-E would never work.I love you telling it to me real straight here. It’s exactly what I was thinking. In some ways I’m driving a dinosaur, right? That’s the whole reason I leased a number of years back.Smart move.I want to go back to price. I was charging at an Electrify America station in Connecticut recently, and four out of the six stalls had these Chevy Equinox EVs. I asked this woman how she likes hers. She said she liked it, but the thing she was really talking about was the price. She said, “We like this car and the price so much that we actually got two.” And she pointed to her husband who’s in the other stall. I’m not thrilled that this type of family’s taking up all these stalls, but it’s fine. I forgive them. I’m wondering if just getting that price down so that EVs can finally take off in lower, more affordable areas is one of your motivating factors right now.To your point, I think it was inevitable that government support would wane. It was inevitable that the duty cycle wound up being EV customers who use their car for commuting and shorter trips, and occasionally taking a longer trip. This happened in the 1910s over 100 years ago. Steam was 30 percent, electric was 30 percent, and the rest was internal combustion engines. A few years later, it was totally different. Back then you could not call which technology would win. It’s the same now. The EVs came at the high end, and I would say $40,000 is expensive now for most people. We don’t talk about it in the car business because more than two-thirds of the cars sold in the US are used. We never really talk about those two-thirds, but their average price is around $30,000. The average new car is obviously much higher than that. Most of the five-year-old vehicles that people are driving around in the US are going to be around $30,000. This is the most important part of the EV market. It’s not expensive Lucids and Teslas. That’s all interesting, but what is really going to move this market is a non-government-subsidized, affordable EV that people can afford, and that’s at a lower cost to use than a used Model Y because there’s a lot of those around. For people in America who have a tough time with all their demands, want to go on vacation, want to put their kids through college, and want to have a house or whatever, $30,000 is the most they want to spend. I think that customer you met is very typical. Sorry to use a baseball analogy, but this next inning is completely different from the first one, where the fitness of the companies doesn’t rely on the government, and we have to innovate.I said it last week, and I’ll emphasize it now: there are no assurances that we can do this. No one has ever built a car in three pieces. No one’s offered their own electric architecture at this price. We’ve never done it. We’ve never had two large unit castings and high quality. No one’s done it. Tesla’s talked about it, but it hasn’t done it. In fact, our manufacturing process has radically moved on beyond what Tesla’s ever shown in its unboxing. So, there’s a lot of risk here. This is not a guarantee that Ford’s going to get this done.You’ve segued really nicely into my next set of questions, which are the Decoder questions. You’ve set out to build something, and now you’ve got to figure out the structure to build it. You said you had to create a maverick group that was separate from Ford, separate in terms of IT. Now, you’ve got to take this skunkworks engineering team, which I believe is in California, and you’ve got to bring that into the big castle that is Ford.Yes.How do you think about integrating these new skunkworks ideas into this bigger system? Have you mapped out how that’s going to happen?Yes. We’ve been working on that for a couple years now. One of the things that really helped us in that regard was that Alan [Clarke], the leader of this Universal EV Platform team, was free to have Ford people on his team but had the right to say no to anyone. So, he went through a very rigorous process. He’s had the team that scouts for the manufacturing process for all this new stuff for three to four years.Of course, we’ve been listening to them. We have a lot of good experience at Ford, too, that knows how to handle risk in supply chain and risk in manufacturing and new processes like the one we use with aluminum F-150. It’s a different problem, but the same process of risk elimination. It’s a plan that has come together. It’s important to have a plan, but you get out of the plan pretty quickly because of surprises. The supplier isn’t as good as you thought, they’re running late, or software for a module is running late. Then, you have to really de-risk. The way we’re thinking about it is, “Let’s make a simple one first. Let’s not try to add all the complexity. Why don’t we just make one color, one version, one spec at the beginning, and massively simplify the task for everyone? What is the basic level of software capability?” We don’t need all the singing and dancing, hands-free automation at launch. Maybe we focus BlueCruise on a simple operating domain like high-speed safety, with hands-off highway operations for the autonomy solution. Then gradually, as we verify the delivery of that base capability — whether it’s the vehicle structure, the manufacturing process of the suppliers, or even automation — we start to introduce more complexity and capability over time when we feel comfortable. That makes it stressful for the go-to-market team because, frankly, they don’t know what they’re going to be selling in a year and a half. But that’s the only way we’ve found to do this.I want to stay on some more Decoder questions, and call you out. In your first Decoder interview in 2021, you dodged the question, “How do you make decisions?” In fact, I was listening to the episode in my Mach-E last week and just screaming, “Jim, you didn’t answer.” You answered about the company’s strategy, but you didn’t answer how you specifically make decisions. I feel like you’ve had to make some big decisions here with this new platform. So, how do you do it?Let’s just be specific. In this case, I looked at the wiring loom in the Mach-E. It’s a beautiful wiring loom, but it’s 70 pounds heavier than the Model Y’s wiring loom, and it’s $200 a battery to carry that wiring loom around. I just had to ask myself the question, “Can my team do it?” Taking the wiring loom as a metaphor, can my team beat BYD?I went to [Executive Chairman] Bill Ford, the board, and my team. I said, “I love you guys, but I don’t think we can do this.” The decision I arrived at, which was highly informed by meeting Doug Fields, was that we had to do it completely separately. Doug is a Model 3 chief engineer and worked on the car project at Apple. He was one of the first-generation software designers in AOS. He also designed the Segway early in his career. He’s been at the forefront of a lot of technology revolutions time and time again. I asked him, “Why can’t Ford do it?” He’s like, “Jim, your part release system, your IT, your CAD design systems are 25 years uncompetitive. There’s no way you can beat BYD with that. You need real expertise.”BYD has vertical integration with the batteries. Its batteries are 30 percent cheaper than what we can buy from CATL. For us to beat that battery, to even be in the neighborhood in terms of cost, we have to radically redesign the efficiency of the motors, gearboxes, and inverters on the EV side so it uses 30 percent less battery. We can’t beat BYD’s vertical integration on the cost of battery. The only way we can beat it was with innovation on the draw of the battery.When I got the list of inventory from Doug about what we have to do to beat BYD, even three to four years ago, it became very obvious to me that I had to look my team in the eyes and say, “Eventually we’re going to come back to you for the industrialization of this product. But for now, leave these people alone, trust that they don’t have any prejudice in coming up with something better. If you want to get mad at me, you can come into my office and shout at me, but don’t waste their time.”I talked to Bill, and I also do Gemba. I go in person for every big decision I ever make. I went to that teardown and looked at every piece. I looked at the number of fasteners in a Model Y. It was literally a third of the fasteners that go into a Mach-E. From a customer standpoint, you won’t tell the difference, but from manufacturability and cost standpoints, fasteners are an output metric for how elegant your engineering solution is. When I looked at those fasteners and the wiring loom, I knew I had no choice because I gemba walked and talked to people who knew. I can’t put the company’s future at risk by making people happy. I have to do the right thing. That’s how I approached that particular decision.Can I interrupt you quickly to tell me what gemba is?Gemba is something that I fell in love with at Toyota. Gemba is “genchi genbutsu,” which is a Japanese phrase for “go and see with your own eyes, learn with your own eyes.” It’s actually the five senses. The idea is that before you make a big decision or want to understand a problem, you have to go and see the real problem and where the waste is. It’s a tool in problem solving. In my case, the waste was that wiring harness, those fasteners, all the welds, the front and rear structures that’ll eventually get displaced by unicasting. You see the waste. You look at it, you ask the engineers: “Why do we have this waste? Why do we use a 25-year-old parts release system?” As a leader, you get down on the floor and you ask them the basic questions, so you can visualize your decision. That’s what gemba is.Love that. Didn’t know that before. I need to practice gemba, clearly.Let me back up here. You have to restructure your company, but it also seems like you’ve been talking about restructuring the economy. You’ve been talking about a refocus on the “Essential Economy,” or the blue-collar jobs that are the backbone of this country. You wrote a LinkedIn essay in June about the focus of AI on white-collar productivity, but that we need to do the same for blue-collar work. How are you thinking about automation at Ford? There’s a complete crisis in the country that’s not being talked about. People like Mike Rowe will talk about it, but we have a crisis that’s not in the public debate. We have a 500,000 construction worker shortfall. We have a 500,000 factory worker shortfall. We don’t have enough people in emergency services to support our society when things go wrong. Firemen, ambulance workers, medical workers, plumbers, and electricians — the frontline people that make our society run that many of us take for granted.We call this the Essential Economy. We see this at Ford because we’re on the edge of this software-defined vehicle, but we’re also a heavy manufacturing industrial company. Whether it’s a technician shortage in our dealerships to work on these vehicles or the factory worker shortage, I really learned as a leader during the United Auto Workers (UAW) strike what a crisis we have as a country. I see it with our customers. Plumbers and electricians are constantly trying to get young people into those vocations, and there’s no training. The trade schools and apprentice programs that our grandparents had that made this country so great are not there anymore. We’re very vulnerable as a country. The productivity of those essential workers, as you said, is way behind that of white-collar workers. Automation, AI deployment, and everything else that has happened for white-collar tools, it’s not the same for blue-collar work. There’s very little training. Companies like Ford, thankfully, have enough resources that we can put our backs behind this problem with trade schools and scholarships, but our society isn’t doing it. In fact, we’re going to have a conference here in Detroit in the fall where we’re going to gather other companies that have the same problem and really see it — solution providers, academics, and creative people in government — and we’re going to try and start working on this problem.Is it a Farm Aid or medical crisis like COVID? No, it’s more. In a way, it’s just as threatening to our society. The way we’re thinking about it is that we’re going to walk the walk and invest heavily. We have been. We spent about $1 billion on the dignity of the workplace and safety in our plants. We’ve modernized our buildings. We’re investing in trade schools and scholarships to recruit technicians for vehicle repair as well as our factories. But this is a society problem. The one that bothers me the most is cultural. We, as a culture, think that everyone has to go to an Ivy League school to be valuable in our society, yet we all know that our parents and grandparents made our country wonderful because of these kinds of jobs. There’s incredible dignity in emergency services, and people can have wonderful careers. But our society doesn’t celebrate those people like they do the latest AI engineer. That’s exactly what I wanted to ask you. This seems like such a reversal of decades of messaging in America that said “Get out of manufacturing and go to the office.” Is your advice to this next generation to actually go get a job in manufacturing?I think it would help all of us as a society. Look, my son [Jameson] is 17. He’s a senior in high school. He’s got every opportunity that you could ever imagine. He doesn’t have to worry like most people. I made sure that he had a summer job where he learned how to weld, to fabricate, to really work with his hands, and relate to people. And he can make a choice. I have no prejudice for Jameson. If he turns out to be the greatest welder or a mechanic working on our Super Duty diesel engines, I will be so thrilled as a parent. I think we all need to look at ourselves and decide what kind of society we want to build in America. Let’s say that we’re getting into war somewhere. Google’s not going to make the boots, but Ford will. To defend our own country, we need these people.Now, we’re having critical issues. The average ambulance is 15 years old. We do not have enough emergency care people. Look at what firemen are having to go through in California with smoke and their own health. These are very dangerous jobs, and we have a shortage. It’s going to affect all of us in a lot of annoying ways. We need to really get serious about readjusting our expectations for our kids, younger people, and our country to give them opportunities to grow. And these are great jobs. A factory job at Ford could make way over $100,000 a year, and you can bridge into a lot of other things. My grandfather was a factory worker at Ford, and he became a Ford dealer in his 60s. Think about the possibility. He was an orphan, he had nothing. He never went to college. It didn’t matter to him.I’m really excited and energized about this. It’s a much bigger problem than fixing Ford and making it a world-class company. It’s important for our country. We need to focus on this just as much as the new exciting AI and the new social media dance on Instagram. Let’s get busy working on these important problems.I do have a call-in question from a guest caller.Nilay Patel: Hey, Jim, it’s Nilay. I’m very excited to be calling in with this question. As you know, I’m a Mustang guy. I have a 2021 Mustang GT convertible. It’s one of my favorite cars ever. People love this car because it’s so easy to mod and tune. You can just reprogram the engine control unit (ECU) to make the car go faster. But with the new version of the gas Mustang, the one with all the screens running on your new platform, the ECUs are locked. People can’t just reprogram them. A lot of enthusiasts attribute the recent drop in gas-powered Mustang sales to the locked ECUs. My questions are: Do you agree with that, that the locked ECUs are behind the recent drop in gas-powered Mustang sales? Do you have a plan to let people unlock the ECUs and tune the car more easily? Thanks for answering the question. Joanna, I’m sure you’re doing a great job.I have no idea what that question means. So–[Laughs] I do. I’m going to set a timer. You get a minute to answer that.I have this debate with my son, actually, because he has an older Mustang. He didn’t buy the new one for reasons like that. I would absolutely say the drop in sales is not due to that. Actually, we’re doing really well with Mustang. I think we’re the only one left really, which we’re quite proud of. We’re investing a lot in Mustang. I think the thing people don’t get about Mustang is that it’s a global car. It’s the best-selling sports coupe in the world. We outsell Mustang outside of the US than inside the US. When I look at sales for Mustang, I look at globally. The Mustang continues to grow in some of our biggest countries like Australia and Sweden because people want a little slice of that America. Everyone wants to do a burnout.As far as the vehicle’s tunability, I think the call-in question is outstanding. This is a real dilemma for us, and there’s no easy answer. We want people to modify their cars, but we also have to take quality and privacy really seriously. I think he was talking more about the performance of the vehicle, and over time, our approach would be to give people the option to digitally adjust their vehicle from Ford, so that we can maintain quality but still let the user have their own idea of performance. That’s different for everyone, and I think that vision will come to life in the coming years.The aftermarket is a real opportunity, but it’s also a big challenge for us because a lot of people like to write software in the control module that controls the powertrain to get better performance. But what they don’t know, and what the user may not be aware of, is that all the reliability and the quality issues that might come up are very expensive. My daughter’s boyfriend is one of these people. He bought a brand new F-150, he’s got a supercharger on it. He recently got a bunch of error codes because he updated the ECU against Ford’s standards, and now he needs thousands of dollars of expensive repairs because the vehicle has started chewing its camshaft. It was great that he could get 650 horsepower out of his EcoBoost F-150. He didn’t think about what he was doing to the reliability of the vehicle, but we have to at Ford.All I would say is that it’s a tough problem to solve. We always want to give customers a chance to tune their vehicles, but we actually know a lot about the reliability of the vehicle. Are we as a brand going to let our quality reputation suffer to give a person the ability to modify the vehicle? I think that’s a hard compromise for us to make.I actually understood most of it. I want to move on to the big T in the room: the tariffs. Last quarter, you operated at a loss despite record revenue because you took $800 million in tariff charges in Q2, when tariffs were actually lower than they are now. What are your conversations like right now with the administration?They’re very important. Ford is the most American company in terms of the quantity of vehicles we make in the US. Over 80 percent of our vehicles sold here are made here. But we also are the largest importer of parts. The discussion we’re having with the administration today covers three policy areas: tailpipe emissions, tax policy, and especially tariffs. On tariffs, the biggest issue is the $2 billion bill for our imported parts. Because we make the most in the US, we import the most parts. We have a lot of stackable tariffs. There’s fentanyl tariffs, [Section 301 tariffs] from China. We have steel and aluminum tariffs that are now over 50 percent. There are a lot of tariffs that a company like Ford gets because there are auto-specific tariffs and non-auto-specific tariffs. They all stack up. So, we have this layering of all these imported parts.To make an F-150 affordable, there are a lot of parts we can’t make locally, like wiring looms and fasteners. There are thousands and thousands of parts that we have to import because we can’t even buy them in the US. If we did, the vehicle would be $100 to $200 a month too expensive for customers. Our discussions with Washington, D.C. are really clear: “Look, we both agree. Let’s strengthen US companies like Ford that have bet on America. We have more UAW jobs than anyone, but don’t penalize us for trying to make the vehicle affordable.”We’ve had very productive discussions with the Department of Commerce, the president himself, and the whole administration on how to come up with a way to minimize this $2 billion bill so that we are advantaged as a company. Originally, they were thinking that there would be high tariffs for finished automotive vehicles. Fifty percent of all vehicles bought in the US are imported through a port or a rail across a border. Now, it looks like the standard tariff will be about 15 percent and 12.5 percent from Japan. That’s not a fair fight. We’re just asking for a fair fight. If you’re going to allow people to import with 15 percent tariffs, which includes their parts in the vehicle, but you put a 50, 60, 70 percent tariff on the aluminum steel that goes into our US-made vehicle, let’s work on a process for tariff relief that would allow us to do that and still make the vehicles affordable.That’s what we’re talking about with the administration. They’re extremely open, and they’re extremely supportive of us. They’re also making a lot of policy changes on tailpipe emissions and tax. Look at the EV credits as an example. We can get to that if you want. But the tariffs are the most critical for our profitability. About 20 percent of our profit has evaporated now because of these parts tariffs. We’re highly engaged with the administration. I remain very optimistic that we will find a solution, but it is very expensive.I wanted to ask about the EV credits because between the tariffs and the EV credits going away, it feels like this administration is on your side. Yet, you are also adding more jobs than ever to manufacturing here in the US. You’re doing the things the president wants.Yes. I do generally believe that those three policy areas are very important. Joanna, we didn’t feel like we should get a $7,500 check on an EV to make the transition successful. We do need support for the production tax credit on batteries, so that we could be competitive with China because it has such a huge advantage, and we do need to onshore that IP to start really scaling battery manufacture. You can’t ship a battery overseas. It’s very heavy and it’s not a good shipper, which we say as a shipper. We have gotten a lot of support from them for making batteries here in the US. The PTC credit is very important. We have changed our EV investment to not depend on the consumer tax credit from the government, and we’re fine with that. Other countries like China and in Europe do support their EV consumers. We didn’t really expect that at Ford. We’re kind of a “lift ourselves up by the bootstraps” kind of company anyway, so that was something we already did.But the relief on fuel economy standards is a very important topic that the administration clearly has a point of view on. We want one national standard, and we want to be able to sell what customers really want. Hybrids are really popular now, and so are EVs. I think we’ll find a tailpipe emission standard that is more reasonable and sustainable and not have a bunch of states with unique standards that make logistics for cars a nightmare, since you have to send different states different emission-standard cars. And that’s really expensive for customers, too.The real area that is super critical for Ford and for companies like Ford that are committed to the US, is tariffs, working through and making adjustments as they and bilateral trade deals get announced. We need to find a landing spot that works for companies like Ford, where it’s a level playing field from a tariff standpoint and the administration accomplishes what it wants to accomplish. We’re not there yet, and that’s why we’re working really hard. I spent a lot of time in DC, and there’s a good reason for it. This is really important for our factory workers, for the future of our country, and for the shareholders of Ford. I want to come back to me because really this whole podcast is about me, obviously.[Laughs] Good.One of the main reasons I decided to get the Mach-E, other than it having good range and me loving the way it drives, was that it had Apple CarPlay. Some of your competitors have abandoned CarPlay. A lot of the newer, upstart car companies, like Rivian and Tesla, have their own software. I want to talk about this new Digital Experience you guys are working on, but I want to just cut to the chase with CarPlay. What about CarPlay Ultra? Are you considering that?We are. We don’t like the execution of Ultra in round one, but we’re very committed to Apple. I’ve talked to Tim [Cook] many times about this. Ford does not have the right, in our opinion, to disrupt someone’s digital life when they get in their car. We want you, Joanna, and all the customers to bring in their digital life, and make it as easy as possible. We don’t think we should restrict that to make money off the customers. We don’t want it to be a hassle. We don’t think we can design an experience that’s going to displace your phone. At the same time, there are things that Ford is working on to add on top of the Google and CarPlay digital experience, whether it’s automated systems or the way a trip gets planned, that will make it even better.We’re highly informed by what’s going on in China right now, specifically the customer experience part. An AI assistant in the car, let’s say, is very important for Ford. We think that every customer should have an AI assistant in the car. Not just a voice to move to your phone-based AI system but something specific that you can talk to, almost like a companion. To allow everyone to bring their digital life into the car and have it seamlessly integrated is a more complicated journey for us to execute. Then, put more on top of that, whether it’s productivity software (we’re now up to 1 million Ford Pro subscriptions now), BlueCruise, how you plan a trip, or auto specific things like how your [Advanced Driver Assistance Systems] (ADAS) system works and how it integrates into your entertainment system. We believe we have to design something that works with your digital life as well.It’s a more complicated choice, especially when you look at backcasting it into all of our past vehicles, but I believe it’s a more customer-centric approach. And you will see that, Joanna, in your next shopping trip. You’ll make that choice, we’ll all read about it. That’s our philosophy. Now, other companies have different philosophies, but we believe that our philosophy is the most customer-centric.But it seems like with the Ford Digital Experience, which you have rolled out to some cars and is based on Android Automotive, that you’re going to have to choose. Are you going to do this Android Automotive experience with the things you’re talking about building on top, or are you going to pick a CarPlay Ultra experience and go all on Apple?I see what you mean. It’s a really good question. I don’t know where Apple’s going to go. I think Apple has to make a big decision. It’s not a Ford decision, actually. Then, we will decide based on their decision.You mean that Apple has to make a decision, or are you going to allow this to also run in combination with other infotainment software?Yes. Not only that, are you going to allow OEMs to control the vehicles? How far do you want the Apple brand to go? Do you want the Apple brand to start the car? Do you want the Apple brand to limit the speed? Do you want the Apple brand to limit access? We’re doing that now for our Pro customers. If you’re a Pro customer, you can limit access to the vehicle on the weekend. Many of our plumbers and electricians have a company vehicle and they’re not allowed to use it on the weekend. We allow speed control now, so you can’t go above the speed limit. Is Apple going to want to do that? If Apple wants to do that, I think we’re going to have a tough time because then the Digital Experience gets really messy, and we’ll have to decide between Google and Apple, to your point.Now, Google has two different layers. It has Google Automotive Services, which is a curated digital services experience in the car, but it also has Android Auto, which is an operating system that we can build our own experience on top of. So, Google as a platform company gives us both. Apple has a totally different approach. Again, I’ve talked to the Apple team and our team is in contact with them. I think Apple has to decide if it wants control of the entire experience inside a vehicle. If it does and it wants to follow Ultra with the Ultra 2 or whatever is next, then Ford will have to make a big decision.I know where we would go. We believe ADAS integration with your entertainment system is so critical. In three or four years when you’re flying down the highway with your eyes off the road going 80 miles an hour on Interstate 5 and you’re watching a movie, having a ChatGPT moment, or having a wearable on, we don’t think that a system from a tech company that’s not integrated into the car is going to save your life. So we’ll have to make a choice.It sounds to me that you’ve been forced with the reality that you’ve got to build your own.Yes, but the good thing is that now versus when you and I last talked, Android Auto is advancing nicely. We’ve learned a lot about how to build an experience on that. I hear a lot of OEMs say, “Well, it’s about controlling the customer. I don’t want Apple to be able to…” That’s not a big deal for us. We just want it to be easy for customers. But if those companies want to control the vehicle, I think that’s a bridge too far. In that case, we have to invest a lot more in a Ford experience.I hope that doesn’t happen, by the way. I look at what has happened with Huawei and Xiaomi in China. It’s amazing. Those companies are all in on auto. When you’re a Huawei or Xiaomi customer, you either buy a Huawei system in someone else’s brand or you buy a Xiaomi car, and it’s completely seamless. I wish our tech companies had approached the auto industry that way, but they haven’t. Now we’ve got to do what we’ve got to do.You said something really interesting about how you want to have an AI companion in the car. I am actually spending a lot of time in the car now talking to ChatGPT. I’m not listening to Decoder. I have my iPhone, it’s coming through CarPlay, it’s Bluetooth paired, and I’ve got my ChatGPT app. I’m not looking at it, it’s safe. I just have it in voice mode and I’m driving to a meeting to meet you. I’ll say, “Tell me what I should know about Jim Farley and where he’s been in the news.” It’s a very interactive conversation, almost like I’m on the phone.How do you think about this? Does Ford have to be a part of that relationship?It’s a good question. I think, yes, especially for anything transportation-related. I want to go somewhere, I want to know about my car and the condition of the car. We either have to be part of the conversation or we have to supply that. Not to be arrogant because of the safety control and the vehicle control, but we actually think we can provide a chat experience that has added value beyond your non-vehicle experience. To your point, we don’t want to burden the customer with two different experiences. That would be really arrogant and really bad for the company.I think people are starting to realize why you’ve been on this, Joanna. The difference between car companies where you have a software-defined vehicle is not going to be what your sheet metal looks like. It won’t be how powerful your EV motor is. That’s all math. All the cars look nice. It’s going to be this digital experience that says why someone buys this or that. We have to sort this out really thoughtfully.Now, in China, Nio has an AI companion in the car. It’s like a physical thing. It’s like a little person, and it works really well. Customers love it. If you look at China being ahead of the West in terms of integrating AI as a companion in your vehicle, early indications are that a well done companion-like functionality from the OEMcan add a lot of value to people’s lives. That’s the direction we’re going. It’s similar to not investing in Level 4 autonomy and robotaxis and putting our effort towards Level 3 automated, eyes-off driving in the AI space. It’s a similar kind of bet. Pick a few places where Ford can add value, but don’t make the customer go backwards. That’s our philosophy.To be clear , you’re more focused on that highway driving experience right now with BlueCruise?For sure. Our number one priority is to not be the first one to do eyes-off, Level 3highway driving, but to be the best, most reliable, and the safest, the one you want to use for you and your loved ones. We took all the Argo AI people and we gave them a choice. Do you want to do highway high speed, eyes-off automation? Push a button, watch a movie, or whatever people want to do? We could do this podcast in your car. All of our AI deployment for autonomous driving is going there because we think that’s a cooler problem to solve for most average Americans than a robotaxi. Even though the robotaxi is a really cool problem — I love being in a Waymo — we think that highway miles are a bigger societal opportunity.Alright, my last question. You get to play car salesman. It’s next August, I got to get rid of this Mach-E. What do I do?Oh, you need to buy another Mach-E. We’ve improved it a lot since your last one. It’s a lot more affordable. We have some wonderful new experiences. I’m going to give you a run for your money in terms of value. It’s a really incredible product that we’ve refined over four years. The Mach-E’s we’re making now are pretty radically different from the earlier ones. We have OTA updated your car, and I know what improvements were in that. The new vehicle, the compute power onboard, the efficiency, the quality, and the improvements to the fit and finish are all material enough that I think you should test-drive one and see what we have.There’s a reason why we just beat the revised Model Y, which is the best-selling alternative — not that you would just use that as your benchmark. I think you’re going to have a lot of fun shopping. I’m going to learn a lot as you go shopping, like the rest of America. What I would love for you to do is wait six months because I want to show you this new Universal car. You’re going to go, “Jim, I’m so glad you told me to wait.”That’s what you can do for me. You can give me an extension on the lease. This is what you should have been doing for me. This is where I would’ve sold me. I would’ve said, “Extension on the lease, six months, we’re going to give you a good deal Joanna. You’re going to be happy.”And bridge you to something that no one will be able to offer. You’ll go, “Oh, my god, this is so much better than anything I could buy, including the Mach-E. I’m really glad I waited.” That’s the right approach.See, I should be working in your dealership. That’s how I would’ve sold it. Well, Jim Farley, thank you so much for spending so much time. I’ve got a ton more questions, but we’ll do this again sometime and have you back on the show.I don’t think you’re driving a dinosaur either. I think you’re driving a fantastic automobile. I love my Mach-E. Frankly, we’re really proud to have you as the owner, and thank you for being on the podcast. I always enjoy our interaction. I can’t wait to learn more about the ChatGPT experience inside your car. I hope you don’t mind if a few of our software engineers call you.Yeah, they should call me. Again, this is not sponsored. I have been a very happy Mach-E driver. I’ve been in it a lot this summer. We didn’t get to it, but the charging infrastructure has improved so much. I charge for 30 minutes at Electrify America, and Electrify America has gotten better. Get that CEO on here. I charge, I’m on my way. I drove 350 miles up to New Hampshire last week.Oh good. I’ve been happy. We’ve got some software things to deal with. We didn’t really get into that, but it sounds like you’re working on it for me.We are. That you for the time, Joanna. All the best to you.You too.Questions or comments about this episode? Hit us up at decoder@theverge.com. We really do read every email!