The formation of Ford Pro – the automaker’s dedicated commercial vehicle entity – was designed to provide specialized services to fleet customers on one hand, but also, to generate massive amounts of profit for the automaker at the same time. One of the biggest ways Ford Pro has done this so far is through connected vehicle services and subscriptions, which have thus far proven to be incredibly popular with commercial customers. Regardless, as Ford CFO John Lawler noted while speaking at the 2024 Bank of America Automotive Summit, the company also feels like there’s still plenty of room for growth, too.
“We have the software to manage that charging. We have the charging infrastructure we’re putting in for those customers, and it’s about
driving their productivity, allowing their vehicles to be on road longer,” Lawler said. “Right now, we have about a 12 percent attach rate on subscription services. It’s about 500,000 we have right now, about 30 percent of our vehicles are equipped with modems that are on the road today. By ’26, we’re going to grow the number of vehicles equipped with modems to 60 percent, and we’re going to take our attach rate from 12 to 36 percent.”
It certainly didn’t take long for fleet customers to take advantage of Ford Pro’s many offerings of this type, as its telematics subscriptions exploded mere months after they became available. That trend continued last year, as Ford Pro enjoyed a 64 percent year-over-year increase in paid software subscriptions in Q1 2023, doubled its mobile repair orders, and posted an increase of 18 percent in wholesales and 28 percent in revenue – bringing the latter total up to $13.2 billion in that quarter alone.
Last year, Blue Oval CEO Jim Farley also pointed out that Ford Pro was created to fast-track and perfect new technology for business vehicles, as those customers tend to be eager early adopters of new technology – such as software that predicts when components are about to fail, which can help prevent costly downtime.
We’ll have more on Ford Pro soon, so be sure and subscribe to Ford Authority for continuous Ford news coverage.
Comment
I would like to see more in the way of disclosure of the many uses Ford has for the info your vehicles are reporting for you, about how your drivers operate, and not just the benefits of scheduling charging and service checkups or actions. Many, many companies who have something to sell you are drooling to get that kind of data to target their marketing more effectively, and in some circumstances, Ford can actually sell your date to those companies – it’s all in the 10 page privacy disclosure you can read as you download the software to company phones, though I suspect less than 1 in 1000 people ever take the time to read and comprehend just what happens to their privacy if they touch “Accept” to telematics programs. FordPass is typical of Ford tech, a little chunky, a bit “Pass-say” compared to similar apps, but useable and friendly enough to ignore any nefarious possibilities that Ford’s partners may have in mind. We are on the doorstep of unimagined access to driver data, actual in-use performance measures, and tracking programs to verify in real time that our company vehicles are where they should be and behaving according to the rules of the company, hopefully much good will follow but I predict, inevitably, a major lawsuit at some point that will target Ford and Fordpass partners for overstepping privacy restrictions.