The chairman is none other than Bill Ford, Henry's great-grandson. Seeking a diplomatic coup à la Nixon's trip to China, Ford has used the power of his family name to gain some leeway with automotive purists and extend an olive branch of sorts to environmentalists. Ford made waves at a speech in Dearborn, Mich., last year when he vowed to make Ford "the world's most environmentally friendly automaker." The world's second-largest car manufacturer has already made its sport-utility vehicles burn cleaner than federal standards. Ford has purchased a controlling interest in a Norwegian electric car maker, and plans to produce the small plastic-bodied electric car for the U.S. market by 2003. The new chairman also made waves in a recent Newsweek piece in which he mused in print about a day when "a large portion of society is going to be driving alternative-fuel vehicles."

Those seemingly innocuous steps have alarmed some financial analysts, who fear, as the New York Times put it, "that the scion of a billionaire family could put environmental causes ahead of profits and undermine the industry's traditionally united front against pressures from environmental groups."

But Ford's overtures of peace toward environmentalists may be a harbinger of change throughout the industry. Carmakers are joining in international alliances that will spend billions of dollars developing highly efficient fuel-cell engines, which run on hydrogen and whose only byproduct is drinkable water. While this fuel-cell technology is still years away from being commercially viable, Toyota and Honda are planning to introduce hybrid gasoline and electric powered cars that get up to 70 miles to the gallon into the U.S. market by the end of the year.

While promises of a green tomorrow abound, automakers, including Ford, continue to make concessions to those who count driving cars with poor fuel efficiency as among the inalienable rights referenced by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence. Earlier this year, Ford rolled out the new four-ton Ford Excursion. Priced at over $45,000, the 19-foot truck gets only 12 miles to the gallon, and is expected to be a serious player in the ongoing game of one-upmanship that continues to draw soccer moms and suburban warriors to ever larger gas-guzzling SUVs. The Excursion is expected to mean big bucks for Ford, with a profit margin as high as $15,000 per truck.

The introduction of the Excursion brought an abrupt end to the warm, fuzzy signs Bill Ford had been giving to environmental groups. In a sign of just how precarious this new alliance is, Dan Becker, the Sierra Club's director of global warming and energy programs, wasted little time in firing back at the quasi-environmentalism practiced by Ford.

Becker called the Excursion a "suburban assault vehicle" and "a rolling ad for improving auto pollution standards." Frank O'Donnell, executive director of the Clean Air Trust, took the criticism a step further, charging that "the Excursion undercuts the illusion of Ford as a green company."

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