William Clay Ford, Jr.

One of the things I've had the advantage of, growing up and being close to the top management of this company and other companies for most of my life, is seeing how CEOs start to believe in their own infallibility. And that really scares me.

I think the world is filled with so much hype and PR bull. Frankly, it all comes out in the end. Good or bad, I'd rather just let our accomplishments really speak for themselves.

Whenever I'm at a party, people are always telling me either to get a new quarterback or make the Taurus back seat bigger.

There are almost no limits in terms of what a car can become.

When we're in a peak, we make a ton of money, and as soon as we make a ton of money, we're desperately looking for a way to spend it. And we diversify into areas that, frankly, we don't know how to run very well.

There are people who think I'm a Bolshevik, and this is all a major distraction at best and heresy at worst. But I really don't care.

I walked in and inherited a management group that I didn't know very well. They didn't know me, and we had a very short window to put together a credible recovery plan.

I don't know if a company can have a soul, but I like to think it can.

I look at safety as, you know, there's active and passive. Passive is how do you survive a crash. Active is accident avoidance. And so that's real-time information to you, as a driver, and to your car, to the wheels of a car that will get you out of a bad situation.

As the technology is developed, autonomous driving could provide driving opportunities for the physically challenged or enable the elderly to continue driving longer. This will be vital as many nations experience an aging population.

Ford comes first before everything else I do in my life.

My great-grandfather was a man of great vision, drive, and native intelligence, with some human flaws amplified by limited education, limited social range, and questionable influence from some of his advisers.