Ford Motor, one of the pillars of the U.S. auto industry, has found a talent from its electric vehicle division to be its next chief financial officer (CFO).
Shelley House, 52, who will become Ford's vice president of finance on June 3, joins from Lucid Motors, where she spent three years helping to introduce the company's first premium electric vehicle. Ford's current CFO, John Lawler, who has been promoted to vice chairman, will report to House when he assumes the CFO role in 2025.
The move from start-up to one of Detroit's Big Three is surprising, but it signals Ford's commitment to becoming an EV company. Ford CEO Jim Farley openly acknowledged during the company's quarterly earnings call that the EV division is its “biggest drag on the company,” and he expects the company to lose more than $5 billion from the division by 2024.
Ford “needs to quickly build a profitable EV business and generate new, recurring revenue streams,” Farley said in his House introduction.
The future CFO will be joining the company as an outsider, but not entirely: She played a key role in Lucid's launch as a public company and previously spent several years at Alphabet's self-driving technology subsidiary, Waymo. Still, she claims that by returning to Michigan, she's returning to her family roots: Her grandfather worked for Ford in tool and die manufacturing, and she herself previously worked for suppliers Visteon and General Motors.
But Ford will face numerous challenges before it can find a way to make electric vehicles profitable, including price pressures, competition from China, environmental measures, a lack of charging infrastructure across the U.S. and weak short-term demand for electric vehicles. It also faces tough reactions from outsiders in the auto industry. Tim Stone, who joined Ford as CFO from SNAP in 2019, left for a software company after just 18 months.
