Ford Get Serious About Electric Vehicles
Ford announced Thursday it is accelerating its investment in electric cars, but cautioned that the industry-wide shortage of semiconductors would pinch profits in 2021.
The US auto giant, released fourth-quarter and annual results, and said it plans $22 billion in electric car investment through 2025, nearly twice the earlier plan.
The announcement is the latest big bet on electric autos by a legacy automaker in the wake of upstart Tesla's growth and in anticipation of Biden administration initiatives to encourage emission-free vehicles.
Last week, Ford's rival General Motors set a target of having most of its fleet emissions-free by 2035.
But Ford said annual operating profits could be dented by $1 to $2.5 billion due to lost auto sales connected to the semiconductor shortage.
Earlier Thursday, Ford said it was trimming output of its F-150 because of the supply issue, following on the heels of other automakers, including GM that announced Tuesday it was shutting productions at three plants, and slashing output in half at another due to chip supply.
"The semiconductor situation is changing constantly, so it's premature to try to size what availability will mean for our full-year performance," said Chief Financial Officer John Lawler.
"Right now, estimates from suppliers could suggest losing 10 to 20 percent of our planned first-quarter production."
Ford reported a fourth-quarter loss of $2.8 billion, compared with a loss of $1.7 billion in the year-ago period.
Revenues fell 9.3 percent to $36 billion.
Ford shares rose 1.6 percent in after-hours trading to $11.55.
What KXCO Is, and Why the Hard Problem Was Never Intelligence
The prevailing enthusiasm assumes the hard problem is intelligence. It is not. It is that banks, hospitals, courts and governments are being asked to let software act on their behalf with no way to establish who decided, on what basis, or whether the record will still read in a decade. KXCO founder Shayne Heffernan sets out the architecture that answers those questions, drawn as a graph, and argues that properly constructed AI is an amplifier of human judgement rather than a replacement for it.
AI Intelligence Scales. Accountability Does Not. Why KXCO Is Built for It.
Capability is becoming abundant and everything abundant gets cheap. What does not get cheap is the person who has to sign, and they can only carry what they can see. Four conditions follow from that, and four independent authorities reached the first of them last month without knowing it.
AI is the Neat Handwriting of the Illiterate
A model in the hands of someone who has read the filing and walked the plant is a clerk. The same model, speaking for someone who has done neither, is a disguise. On AI slop, phantom citations and factslop, why finish stopped being evidence of work, and the containment layer KXCO built so a machine cannot speak as the institution until a source is attached.
Worthship: Do Not Conform to the Age
Worthship is the older English word for worship, and it means to ascribe worth. Bishop Robert Barron preached Romans 12 on 30 August. This essay follows the text into the prison letters, and puts two questions to a graph: do the four readings of that Sunday agree, and was Paul free or in chains when he wrote about despair?
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