Blue talk: our exclusive chat with Richard Parry-Jones, group vice president, global product development, and chief technical officer, ford, reveals how the blue oval intends to improve quality via enhanced development programs

摘要

Richard Parry-Jones could well be the finest vehicle development engineer in the world today, a man obsessed with dragging every element of vehicle development at his huge company into the 21St Century as quickly as he can. His expertise has seen him rise to the heady heights of group vice president, global product development, and chief technical officer of Ford Motor Company, overseeing product development for all Blue Oval-branded vehicles worldwide, as well as handling design, research, and vehicle technology functions. The bottom line is that Parry-Jones has product development responsibility for all Ford, Lincoln, Mercury, Aston Martin, Jaguar, Land Rover, Mazda, and Volvo products, and for the Premier Performance Division that includes the Pi Research data acquisition and display company, the Ford World Rally Championship effort, and Jaguar's Formula I racing program. In his role, Parry-Jones heads Ford's huge engineering organization, with a technical staff of some 33,000 engineers, scientists, designers, and planners, including about 3,000 development engineers at 10 centers around the world in North and South America, Europe, and Asia. As chief technical officer, he is responsible to the company's board of directors for all technical matters. In his spare time - if he has any Parry-Jones also serves as a visiting professor of aeronautical and automotive engineering at England's Loughborough University, a position he has held since October 2001.