The people at Ford are excited.
Fired up, charged, revved up, eager, however you want to put it. That’s what just about every Ford employee I’ve spoken to and heard from in the last 24 hours has communicated about what the company has in store for the next few years.
In fact, folks inside the Blue Oval were so excited about what’s coming down the line that they invited media members to an impromptu event Thursday at the company’s product development center in Dearborn, Michigan, to reveal details of the automaker’s plans to thoroughly revamp its lineup by 2020. They did this while, perhaps a bit cruelly, teasing what the company is calling “the industry’s freshest lineup by 2020” without actually introducing the highly anticipated goods (including a certain SUV named for a horse) to the public.
While we have no new trucks to show you, the main takeaway out of this event is that a lot more Ford trucks are coming. And there’s quite a bit to look forward to, including a new Bronco, a baby Bronco and a Mustang-inspired electric SUV.
Ford president and CEO Jim Hackett admitted that an event about future vehicles without the introduction of any, well, vehicles, felt a bit odd even to him. However, Hackett said that the he and the rest of the company’s leadership feels so strongly about Ford’s plans for the future that it was important to place a mile marker here in 2018 for what’s coming down the road.
“What we all can agree on is being frozen in the past really is a death sentence in business,” Hackett said while discussing the purpose of the event. “The world, plus our industry inside of it, are evolving at light speed. In fact I say it’s moving so fast that you can’t chase it. You have to get ahead of it. So we’re looking at things that we never would have imagined 10 years ago.”
