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Has Ford's new boss done enough to get shareholders back on the road? How will China's push for electric vehicles shake up the industry and the country? And what are the roadblocks to building the car of the future? These are the issues we'll be tackling in this week's edition of the Views Room, a weekly conversation among Breaking Views columnists about the ups and downs of the world of finance. I'm Jennifer Sabah, my co-host, as always, is Anthony Curry. Hello, Antity. Good-day. So Jim Hackett jumped

into the driver's seat at Ford Motor back in May after the board sacked incumbent Mark Fields. This

week he laid out his vision for America's second largest automaker. Anthony, this comes as the

industry prepares for a great deal of upheaval in the

future, as autonomous vehicles are coming on the horizon. Rival General Motors stock has been

racing ahead. Take us through. Where is Ford right now and what are Hackett's big issues that he's

facing right now? Okay, let's put where Ford is in a broader context, right? So how do they stack up? Let's go way back to the financial crisis. Ford was the only one of the big three automakers in America that didn't have to go through bankruptcy. And also had a very good CEO, Alan Malalley, who was brought in in 2006, outside the industry, just as Jim Hackett has been brought in from outside the industry. He's not a car person.

This meant that Ford's stock, as a result, raced ahead of the others when markets came back,

around 10 million cars being sold in America a year, the depths of the crisis, if not fewer

than that, all the way up to 17, 17.5 million last year.

So Ford was doing really, really well.

It got its small cars back on the road properly properly and it invested decently in trucks as well. Okay, but now what's happened?

Well, then it started slipping. Malawi left. Mark Fields, a long-term veteran took over. And they

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