Ford Withdraws Hybrid Promise

On June 29th 2006, Detroit News published an article by Bryce G. Hoffman and Deb Price entitled 'Ford bails out on hybrid promise'. Here is a snippet:

Ford Motor Co. Chairman and CEO Bill Ford Jr. is backing away from his much-publicized commitment to produce 250,000 hybrid vehicles a year by the end of the decade, saying the company intends to pursue a broader environmental strategy that focuses more on other alternative-fuel vehicles.

With timing perhaps intended to blunt criticism of the move, Bill Ford announced the strategic shift in an e-mail to employees Wednesday, the same day he and the CEOs of General Motors Corp. and DaimlerChrysler AG's Chrysler Group sent a letter to Congress promising to double their annual production of alternative-fuel vehicles to 2 million by 2010. Critics decried the back-pedaling on hybrids as another broken promise by the automaker to build more fuel-efficient vehicles.

Bill Ford's hybrid pledge, made last September, was the centerpiece of a national advertising campaign touting the company as an environmental and innovation leader. "What I didn't foresee at the time was how rapidly other technologies would evolve," Bill Ford wrote in the e-mail, obtained by The Detroit News. "Now, I am convinced that the objective we had set earlier to build capacity for 250,000 hybrids at the end of the decade is too narrow to achieve our larger goals of substantially improving fuel economy and CO2 performance."

Bill Ford said the company will now focus more on other fuels like ethanol, clean diesel and bio-diesel, as well as advanced engine and powertrain technologies.