Bill Ford: A future beyond traffic gridlock

By birth and by choice,

I've been involved with the auto industry my entire life,

and for the past 30 years,

I've worked at Ford Motor Company.

And for most of those years,

I worried about,

how am I going to sell more cars and trucks?

But today I worry about,

what if all we do is sell more cars and trucks?

What happens

when the number of vehicles on the road doubles, triples,

or even quadruples?

My life is guided by two great passions,

and the first is automobiles.

I literally grew up with the Ford Motor Company.

I thought it was so cool as a little boy

when my dad would bring home the latest Ford or Lincoln

and leave it in the driveway.

And I decided about that time, about age 10,

that it would be really cool if I was a test driver.

So my parents would go to dinner.

They'd sit down; I'd sneak out of the house.

I'd jump behind the wheel and take the new model around the driveway,

and it was a blast.

And that went on for about two years,

until -- I think I was about 12 --

my dad brought home

a Lincoln Mark III.

And it was snowing that day.

So he and mom went to dinner,

and I snuck out

and thought it'd be really cool to do donuts

or even some figure-eights in the snow.

My dad finished dinner early that evening.

And he was walking to the front hall

and out the front door

just about the same time I hit some ice

and met him at the front door with the car --

and almost ended up in the front hall.

So it kind of cooled my test-driving for a little while.

But I really began to love cars then.

And my first car was a 1975 electric-green Mustang.

And even though the color was pretty hideous,

I did love the car,

and it really cemented my love affair with cars

that's continued on to this day.

But cars are really more than a passion of mine;

they're quite literally in my blood.

My great grandfather was Henry Ford,

and on my mother's side,

my great grandfather was Harvey Firestone.

So when I was born,

I guess you could say expectations were kind of high for me.

But my great grandfather, Henry Ford,

really believed that the mission of the Ford Motor Company

was to make people's lives better

and make cars affordable so that everyone could have them.

Because he believed that with mobility

comes freedom and progress.

And that's a belief that I share.

My other great passion is the environment.

And as a young boy, I used to go up to Northern Michigan

and fish in the rivers that Hemingway fished in

and then later wrote about.

And it really struck me

as the years went by,

in a very negative way,

when I would go to some stream that I'd loved,

and was used to walking through this field

that was once filled with fireflies,

and now had a strip mall or a bunch of condos on it.

And so even at a young age,

that really resonated with me,

and the whole notion of environmental preservation,

at a very basic level, sunk in with me.

As a high-schooler, I started to read

authors like Thoreau and Aldo Leopold

and Edward Abbey,

and I really began to develop

a deeper appreciation of the natural world.

But it never really occurred to me

that my love of cars and trucks

would ever be in conflict with nature.

And that was true

until I got to college.

And when I got to college, you can imagine my surprise

when I would go to class

and a number of my professors would say

that Ford Motor Company and my family

was everything that was wrong with our country.

They thought that we were more interested, as an industry,

in profits, rather than progress,

and that we filled the skies with smog --

and frankly, we were the enemy.

I joined Ford after college,

after some soul searching

whether or not this is really the right thing to do.

But I decided that I wanted to go

and see if I could affect change there.

And as I look back over 30 years ago,

it was a little naive to think at that age

that I could. But I wanted to.

And I really discovered

that my professors weren't completely wrong.

In fact, when I got back to Detroit,

my environmental leanings weren't exactly embraced

by those in my own company,

and certainly by those in the industry.

I had some very interesting conversations,

as you can imagine.

There were some within Ford

who believed that all this ecological nonsense

should just disappear

and that I needed to stop hanging out

with "environmental wackos."

I was considered a radical.

And I'll never forget the day I was called in by a member of top management

and told to stop associating

with any known or suspected environmentalists.

(Laughter)

Of course, I had no intention of doing that,

and I kept speaking out about the environment,

and it really was the topic

that we now today call sustainability.

And in time, my views went from controversial

to more or less consensus today.

I mean, I think most people in the industry

understand that we've got to get on with it.

And the good news is today we are tackling the big issues,

of cars and the environment --

not only at Ford, but really as an industry.

We're pushing fuel efficiency to new heights.

And with new technology,

we're reducing -- and I believe, someday we'll eliminate --

CO2 emissions.

We're starting to sell electric cars, which is great.

We're developing alternative powertrains

that are going to make cars affordable

in every sense of the word --

economically, socially

and environmentally.

And actually, although we've got a long way to go

and a lot of work to do,

I can see the day where my two great passions --

cars and the environment --

actually come into harmony.

But unfortunately,

as we're on our way to solving one monstrous problem --

and as I said, we're not there yet; we've got a lot of work to do,

but I can see where we will --

but even as we're in the process of doing that,

another huge problem is looming,

and people aren't noticing.

And that is the freedom of mobility

that my great grandfather brought to people

is now being threatened, just as the environment is.

The problem, put in its simplest terms,

is one of mathematics.

Today there are approximately 6.8 billion people in the world,

and within our lifetime, that number's going to grow

to about nine billion.

And at that population level,

our planet will be dealing with the limits of growth.

And with that growth

comes some severe practical problems,

one of which is our transportation system

simply won't be able to deal with it.

When we look at the population growth in terms of cars,

it becomes even clearer.

Today there are about 800 million cars on the road worldwide.

But with more people

and greater prosperity around the world,

that number's going to grow

to between two and four billion cars by mid century.

And this is going to create the kind of global gridlock

that the world has never seen before.

Now think about the impact

that this is going to have on our daily lives.

Today the average American

spends about a week a year

stuck in traffic jams,

and that's a huge waste of time and resources.

But that's nothing compared

to what's going on

in the nations that are growing the fastest.

Today the average driver in Beijing

has a five-hour commute.

And last summer -- many of you probably saw this --

there was a hundred-mile traffic jam

that took 11 days to clear in China.

In the decades to come,

75 percent of the world's population

will live in cities,

and 50 of those cities

will be of 10 million people or more.

So you can see the size of the issue that we're facing.

When you factor in population growth,

it's clear that the mobility model that we have today

simply will not work tomorrow.

Frankly, four billion clean cars on the road

are still four billion cars,

and a traffic jam with no emissions

is still a traffic jam.

So, if we make no changes today,

what does tomorrow look like?

Well I think you probably already have the picture.

Traffic jams are just a symptom of this challenge,

and they're really very, very inconvenient,

but that's all they are.

But the bigger issue

is that global gridlock

is going to stifle economic growth

and our ability to deliver

food and health care,

particularly to people that live in city centers.

And our quality of life is going to be severely compromised.

So what's going to solve this?

Well the answer isn't going to be more of the same.

My great grandfather once said

before he invented the Model T,

"If I had asked people then what they wanted,

they would have answered,

'We want faster horses.'"

So the answer to more cars

is simply not to have more roads.

When America began moving west,

we didn't add more wagon trains,

we built railroads.

And to connect our country after World War II,

we didn't build more two-lane highways,

we built the interstate highway system.

Today we need that same leap in thinking

for us to create a viable future.

We are going to build smart cars,

but we also need to build

smart roads, smart parking,

smart public transportation systems and more.

We don't want to waste our time

sitting in traffic, sitting at tollbooths

or looking for parking spots.

We need an integrated system

that uses real time data

to optimize personal mobility on a massive scale

without hassle or compromises for travelers.

And frankly, that's the kind of system

that's going to make the future of personal mobility sustainable.

Now the good news is some of this work has already begun

in different parts of the world.

The city of Masdar in Abu Dhabi

uses driverless electric vehicles

that can communicate with one another,

and they go underneath the city streets.

And up above, you've got a series of pedestrian walkways.

On New York City's 34th Street,

gridlock will soon be replaced

with a connected system

of vehicle-specific corridors.

Pedestrian zones and dedicated traffic lanes are going to be created,

and all of this will cut down the average rush hour commute

to get across town in New York

from about an hour today at rush hour

to about 20 minutes.

Now if you look at Hong Kong,

they have a very interesting system called Octopus there.

It's a system that really ties together

all the transportation assets

into a single payment system.

So parking garages, buses, trains,

they all operate within the same system.

Now shared car services

are also springing up around the world,

and these efforts, I think, are great.

They're relieving congestion,

and they're frankly starting to save some fuel.

These are all really good ideas

that will move us forward.

But what really inspires me

is what's going to be possible

when our cars can begin talking to each other.

Very soon, the same systems that we use today

to bring music and entertainment

and GPS information into our vehicles

are going to be used to create

a smart vehicle network.

Every morning I drive about 30 miles

from my home in Ann Arbor to my office in Dearborn, Michigan.

And every night I go home,

my commute is a total crapshoot.

And I often have to leave the freeway

and look for different ways

for me to try and make it home.

But very soon we're going to see the days

when cars are essentially talking to each other.

So if the car ahead of me on I-94 hits traffic,

it will immediately alert my car

and tell my car to reroute itself

to get me home in the best possible way.

And these systems are being tested right now,

and frankly they're going to be ready for prime time pretty soon.

But the potential of a connected car network

is almost limitless.

So just imagine:

one day very soon,

you're going to be able to plan a trip downtown

and your car will be connected to a smart parking system.

So you get in your car,

and as you get in your car,

your car will reserve you a parking spot before you arrive --

no more driving around looking for one,

which frankly is one of the biggest users of fuel

in today's cars in urban areas --

is looking for parking spots.

Or think about being in New York City

and tracking down an intelligent cab on your smart phone

so you don't have to wait in the cold to hail one.

Or being at a future TED Conference

and having your car

talk to the calendars of everybody here

and telling you all the best route to take home

and when you should leave

so that you can all arrive at your next destination on time.

This is the kind of technology

that will merge millions of individual vehicles

into a single system.

So I think it's clear we have the beginnings of a solution

to this enormous problem.

But as we found out with addressing CO2 issues,

and also fossil fuels,

there is no one silver bullet.

The solution is not going to be

more cars, more roads or a new rail system;

it can only be found, I believe,

in a global network

of interconnected solutions.

Now I know we can develop the technology

that's going to make this work,

but we've got to be willing to get out there

and seek out the solutions --

whether that means vehicle sharing or public transportation

or some other way we haven't even thought of yet;

our overall transportation-mix and infrastructure

must support all the future options.

We need our best and our brightest

to start entertaining this issue.

Companies, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists,

they all need to understand

this is a huge business opportunity,

as well as an enormous social problem.

And just as these groups

embrace the green energy challenge --

and it's really been amazing to me to watch

how much brain power, how much money

and how much serious thought

has, really over the last three years,

just poured into the green energy field.

We need that same kind of passion and energy

to attack global gridlock.

But we need people like all of you in this room,

leading thinkers.

I mean, frankly, I need all of you

to think about how

you can help solve this huge issue.

And we need people from all walks of life;

not just inventors, we need policymakers

and government officials

to also think about how they're going to respond to this challenge.

This isn't going to be solved

by any one person or one group.

It's going to really require a national energy policy,

frankly for each country,

because the solutions in each country are going to be different

based upon income levels, traffic jams

and also how integrated

the systems already are.

But we need to get going, and we need to get going today.

And we must have an infrastructure

that's designed to support

this flexible future.

You know, we've come a long way.

Since the Model T,

most people never traveled

more than 25 miles from home in their entire lifetime.

And since then,

the automobile has allowed us the freedom

to choose where we live, where we work,

where we play

and frankly when we just go out and want to move around.

We don't want to regress and lose that freedom.

We're on our way to solving --

and as I said earlier, I know we've got a long way to go --

the one big issue that we're all focused on that threatens it,

and that's the environmental issue,

but I believe we all must turn

all of our effort and all of our ingenuity and determination

to help now solve this notion of global gridlock.

Because in doing so,

we're going to preserve what we've really come to take for granted,

which is the freedom to move

and move very effortlessly around the world.

And it frankly will enhance our quality of life

if we fix this.

Because, if you can envision, as I do,

a future of zero emissions

and freedom to move around the country and around the world

like we take for granted today,

that's worth the hard work today

to preserve that for tomorrow.

I believe we're at our best

when we're confronted with big issues.

This is a big one, and it won't wait.

So let's get started now.

Thank you.

(Applause)