Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news.
Coming up. It's the Davos of the automotive world.
I don't think there's a better way to promote your brand to win here.
I think it's bigger.
One would before.
Bloomberg's Hot Pursuit goes inside the action, giving you exclusive access to the world's most grueling endurance race. Welcome to the twenty four Hours of Lamont.
Welcome to a special edition of Hot Pursuit. I'm Matt Miller along with Hannah Elliott.
We're in Lamon, France for the legendary twenty four Hours of Lamon, one of the most prestigious, challenging, and historically significant races in motorsports.
Leamon isn't just about speed, It's about Survivalour.
Hours of Lamon is part of the Automotive Triple Crown, alongside the Monaco Graham Prix and the Indianapolis five hundred. It's a grueling endurance test that has attracted top level executives and business titans as a destination for networking and deal making. Those pilots who survived across the Finnic line when sporting glory and a permanent place in the history books.
For over a century, Laman has been the ultimate proven ground for what cars and car companies are made of.
We sat down with Ford CEO Jim Farley and Aston Martin CEO Adrian Hallmark to talk about the ROI of motorsport.
For us, the biggest is off road market. You know, we have you know, almost twenty percent of a global profit coming from our enthusiast off road products, and we race it to car. We said Baja, we have said King and the Hammers. That's a big thing.
You know.
I don't think there's a better way to promote your brand.
Look what Ford winning in sixty six at Lama did for Ford Motor Company. It made us a global company. We're an American company, but that moment changed us completely, and that's why we're going back in twenty seven to take on Ferrari and take on Porsche. We think we have the technology but also the tech transfer software, battery, tech, aerodynamics. It's different than the seventies, but the tech transfer over
to our road cars is immediate. You'll see hundreds of Ford engineers here who will be working on Monday on our road cars. And it's really important tech transfer, but we do it I think as smart as we can, and maybe as a racer, I'm more sensitive about wasting money on racing, and we challenge ourselves to be really smart.
I think we've done a great job with.
The off road, the raptors, the tremors, all the broncos. I think that's been, frankly, some of the smartest investment we had in racing.
You say you're an American company, and you've outed yourself as literally the most American car maker. Eighty percent of the cars that you sell in America are made there. Donald Trump was saying maybe he's going to go after even higher auto tariffs. While you've said in the past that causes costs and chaos, does it also kind of help you because no one else makes as many cars as you do in America.
Well, for Ford, this is a moment for us.
You know, we we have employee pricing out there. We gained a couple points to share year over year. A lot of Americans are shopping forward because now they're starting to think, hey, half the cars in the US are imported, and if all the car companies were like Ford, there'd be fifteen new factories in the US, a million new jobs. You know, I think a lot of Americans are starting to pay attention to where these where these cars come from.
And for US, yes, I think Donald Trump's policies, especially around the Asian countries where you know they've supported with substities direct or indirect for their automobile industry.
You know, this is a great thing.
We have to sort out this Mexico Canada thing because we need to keep the vehicles affordable in the US and there's actually a lot of parts we can't even make in the US, and so we have to kind of sort out what it rolled does Mexico and Canada have in our North America market from supply chain.
And manufacturing keep the vehicles.
Affordable, and that's something that we're talking to administration. We found the administration to be very positive to work with. They want to help companies like Ford that did the right thing for Americans.
But we have more work to do in.
Terms of what the administration has been trying to do with China. Are you satisfied with the rare earth minerals that you have access to. I know that you had to slow down production in the past. Have you been able to secure the amount of magnets that you need.
It's day to day. It's day to day. These high patron magnets. The raw materials for them only come from certain places in the world. They're all processed in China, and they go in your speakers and your autosystem. They go in your motors, for your wipers and your seats. They're all over our f one fifty for example. We have applications in them offcom. They're getting approved one at
a time. You know, we're educating the administration, we're educating the Chinese leadership about how important these jobs in the Midwest are.
They are dependent. We have had to shut down factories. It's hand to mouth right now.
The electric business, though, I would imagine, also is dependent on in some sense higher gas prices.
I drove your Lightning. It was fantastic, spent a week in it.
I've driven the Machi for a couple of weeks, and one of the great pleasures is you don't ever have to go to a gas station. Right How are those businesses doing right now because you've taken such big losses there and maybe slowed down in terms of your progress into evs.
Yeah, we've really changed because we're thankful we've been number two to Tesla for three years in the US because we spent our capital like five six years ago and all that product's been out for four years that you mentioned. So we've learned a ton now. We've changed our capital allocation for evs. We've reduced suspending, changed the battery chemistry a lot to focus on more profitability. We've gone down
market and mostly in commercial. Those are the only markets where we think in the US, you know, an age seven percent of the industry is going to make sense for EV where you can actually make money. And the EPA requirements have a big impact on the EV investments
by OEMs. During the last several years, you know, we had to kind of sell like fifteen to twenty percent of our mix to be evs, both for the ZEV states California, Colorado, New York, but also you know, to meet the national tailpipe emissions.
And so what's happened.
Interestingly, the total number of evs in the US has grown, but the total revenue has not changed in three years because the prices have come down equal to the volume going up. So the EV market has not been going for three years. If you look at total revenue. Everyone looks at unit volume. Don't look at that, look at the price and the volume, and I think we now
have a good strategy going forward. A lot of our competitors are just investing for the first time, and good luck if you're selling eighty thousand dollars SUV electric vehicle. We've invested a lot in hybrid. We are really successful with our truck. Hybrid's the best selling vehicle in the US for forty seven years, been in the F one fifty. Twenty five percent of those customers now by hybrid, and.
A lot of it is exportable power.
You can run your house for six days within F one fifty hybrid now, and the others don't.
Offer that at all.
Aston Martins CEO Adrian Hallmark.
Talk a little bit about what the brand gets out of the race. Obviously this is an iconic race. What do you get from it as a company?
I think if you compare it with that Formula one activity, the media coverage is a fraction of the pure global awareness that F one gets, But if you look at people that are interested in high performance.
Vehicles, it's much more relevant.
So it's a smaller audience, but it's almost self selecting because most people buy supercalls hypercast sports cause they love endurance racing. Why I've used this that we all have before until Formula One got a lot bigger in terms of number of races per year when it was only sixteen races.
Rough that's exactly the same as a twenty four hour race.
So Lamont is the same as a full season of Formula One back ten years ago and faster. So from a technical challenge point of view, a people challenge point of view, it's got to be the most demanding, incredible sport in motorsport.
Talk to us a little bit about sustainability at Aston Martin. Where are you guys with the sustainable power trade and where are you taking from the racing that we might see in the cars in the future.
So I think from a Lamont point of view, it's probably the furthest away from our sustainability strategy.
Why we have no hybrid.
We've gone for a naturally aspirated twelve cylinder engine, which is what makes the Valkyrie Lamon cars so incredible. There's nothing else on the track like it. But if you go to the road cars, we've just launched Valhalla. It's a hypercar. It's two point six seconds to sixty two miles per hour, over one thousand horsepower carbon fiber tub hybrid system front electric axle, high power V eight engine and a motor in the gearbox to combination well.
Over one thousand horsepower.
That's our first plug in hybrid for the road as a regular car. Over the next five years, all of our cars will be hybridized, and then within the ten year window we'll have launched one or maybe two electric vehicles. But we certainly see for the next ten years until twenty thirty five, let's say, the majority of our business now will be electrified combustion engine systems that massively reduced real world emissions but also give more importantly, way more horsepower than the current products.
And that's the direction that we've taken.
I sat down with Laurence Stroller at Q or whatever you call your Aston Martin shop in New York on fifty seven the Park, and he was doing with me the back of the napkin math of what Aston Martin could be if it got even half of a Ferrari valuation. I'm sure that's the goal that you're aiming for as well. What are your plans to get there and what do you have to do to get investors to attribute that kind of valuation to Aston Martin.
One word perform.
You know, as a company, we've been around for one hundred and twelve years and it's been a rocky journey for that one hundred and twelve years. The brand has endured, it's got a fantastic reputation. The response that you get in an Aston Martin is unlike anything I've experienced, and you know, I've been with great German brands and another great British brand for combined twenty five years of my life.
You can't stop at a gas station or at a hotel without somebody taking a picture of you or asking you a question about the car.
It's phenomenal power is there.
What we need is a consistent approach to product development, which under Lawrence and that new investment approach has.
Begun the first five years.
If you look at what we've refreshed and what we've delivered, Vanquish has knocked it out the park. We're beating the Italian competitor in road test hands down. That's never happened before. We've been accredited being better looking in certain products, but never on a track in absolute extreme conditions. The asten's the best. So we build cars at work. They look fantastic. But we've really got to now with this transition between
the current product range, the hybrid range and electric. We've got a whole strategy which I can't talk about in detail today, which will rely on less volume growth, more quality of margin, quality of business, operational excellence, all the quite boring stuff that makes great companies even greater. We've all done it before and that's what we intend to do here. So we've got the brand, we've got the performance,
we've got the design. We've now going to make the business as beautiful as the cars.
Up next, we'll go one on one with racers behind the wheel. Welcome back to a special edition of Hot Pursuit. I'm Hannah Elliott along with Matt Miller.
For Racers Lemon Is where legends are made. We caught up with Formula one world champion Jensen Button as well as Michelle Gatting, a member of the Iron Dames all female auto racing team.
We talked about what makes this race so different than any other. Tell us a little bit about the difference of between what it takes to be a great endurance driver, versus F one driver. I know it's a slightly different skill set.
F one driver it's the most selfish role possible in sport, say more, because it's all about you. You know, you know that the team will say, you're racing for this team. You know you've got to put the team first. But we all know that the driver is racing for themselves because you win a championship and you know your main competitor is your teammate who is in the same car as you, and he's the person that you have to be He's the one you get judged against. So you
have to be selfish. And that mentality was very difficult for me when I when I got married and I had kids and suddenly you're the least most important person in the household. So getting over that selfishness was quite difficult for me, and it took It did take a moment. Insurance racing is very different because you have to work with your teammates. You've got to work with your team to develop the car and compromise. You know, compromising is something that you're not very good at doing. As an
fun driver endurance driver. It's all about compromise, it's about getting your teammates at your level or even higher than where you are, because then you know, even if you're the slowest guy in the car, you know you're quick.
You must work on maximizing your strength for those for those forty five minutes or whatever. And here, like you have to wake up at three in the morning and get back in the car. What is it like driving at night? Driving or tired? What is it like seeing the sun rise as you're you know, doing you know, one hundred and eighty five miles an hour down a straight at Lamar.
You are always jet liked, basically, you know, that's the feeling that you have when you're driving the car.
You're jet like.
You know that you're slightly off, always slightly off. If you're lucky enough to get into the start of the race, that's probably the only time that feels normal. The love of this race for me is is sunrise sunset. You know, that just blows my mind. When the sun drops and darkness falls, the circuit comes alive, it becomes quicker, the wind drops, the cars are a bit easier to drive, but you have to get used to that change in light,
which is also very difficult. And I don't know, if you've noticed, there's a lot of buz here at the moment, so we've got yeah there. So like after two laps you have a covered wind screen and trying to look through that when the sun's in your eyes it's not easy. So sunset's great. Sunrise. The best moment of the race, you know, really is when the sunrises, you see.
How dirty the cars are. You know you've come through the night.
You kind of feel like you're at the end already, even though you have another ten hours to go. So that moment is a very special moment and you've got through the night. If you've not had issues, you're still in with a chance of a win.
The shell Gatting a member of the Iron Dames all female auto racing team.
The Iron Dames were born in twenty eighteen. It's an all female project that is supporting women in motorsport not only as drivers, but as engineers, mechanics on the marketing side because the sport is it's huge and it needs people like women as well. And the project is special because we are an all female end up sharing a car, three women racing against all the others, and the end of the day, like we always say, we when we.
Put the helmets on.
We have race drivers like anybody else, but we definitely want to give female drivers a chance to be seen out there, because that's what's been missing over the years. And I think what the project has been doing since the very beginning in twenty eighteen has really been showcasing that women can compete on the same level as men
in the highest level of endurance racing. We have won races in the World Championship, in the European Championship, and we are proving that we can race alongside the men and we can beat them.
I just want to ask, because I have a couple of daughters at home, four and one. They're watching racing with me every weekend, what do I do to get Edna and Lola into this sport, to get them prepared and hopefully to a higher level.
Well, the first thing you should do is bring them to a race, bring them down to the Iron Name's garage and show them that there are three ladies there. Who is proving to your girls that is possible. Because we had a dream we were their age. You know, back then, when I was very young, it was difficult to have somebody to look up to. In terms of
female drivers, because there was not really any. Now hopefully we are the drivers that your two daughters can look up to and say, yeah, but they are doing it because with hard work, dedication, and passion and commitment, you can do whatever you want in life. And this is what we want to showcase with the Iron Dames Project.
That's it for this edition of Hot Pursuit. Thanks for joining us.
Tune in to see more of Hannah and me on our Hot Pursuit podcast. Wherever you get your podcasts, this is Bloomberg