Jeep vs Bronco | Back in the Saddle | 5

0:05I'm David Brown and this is Business Wars.

0:30The story of Jeep versus Bronco is a decades-long rivalry. Jeep, developed in the 40s for wartime, was the brand that started it all, kicking off the SUV movement before it even had a name or a consumer market. Even today, this vehicle is by some count stronger than ever. Talk about tough. Then came the Bronco in the 1960s that took the market by storm. It fell off in the 90s but came back hot in the 2020s, thanks to a secret underground effort at Ford that ultimately revived its flagship SUV. And when the Bronco hit the market after a nearly 25-year hiatus, well, fans couldn't get enough. Well, over the past 24 hours, the automotive world buzzed with the Ford Bronco's rebirth.

1:12I can't remember a more hotly anticipated car in the entire history of my YouTube channel. These guys really did almost blow up the internet last night. Ford knows they're going to move a lot of metal in this one. Mark Gruber was one of the Ford employees involved with the Bronco Underground, as they call themselves, a clandestine movement that brought the Bronco back to life. He was a big part of this season of Business Wars. And now that the Bronco Underground is very much above ground, Mark joins us to talk about the project and share why the new Bronco's launch may have been the most stressful of his career.

1:44Later, we'll be speaking with Larry Webster, editor-in-chief at Hagerty Media, an outlet covering all things automotive. He also hosts the Never Stop Driving podcast, where listeners can ride along and hear the latest discussions in car culture. Larry joins us for a joy ride through the evolution of the SUVs from Jeeps to Broncos and way beyond to understand how this segment became the nation's most popular. Plus, we'll talk about what's ahead for this gas-guzzling market as the industry trends toward electric vehicles. All that's coming up next on Business Wars.

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4:27Mark Gruber, welcome to Business Wars. Thank you. Thanks for having me. I understand you go a long ways back with Ford. You were something like a fourth generation Ford employee. Is that true? That's right. I grew up in Dearborn, Michigan, right in the shadows of Ford. and both my parents worked for Ford and my grandfather probably had the most distinguished career within the family. He worked on the soybeans and started up the AC department at Ford and then his father worked briefly with Ford as well. So a long history of Ford employees in my family. A lot of folks don't know that story about the soybeans, but that's an incredible chapter in Ford's history.

5:07This was back when Henry Ford started up a soybean laboratory to create alternative forms of oils and plastic, very innovative stuff. So I gather your grandfather actually worked with, alongside Henry Ford at one point? That's right. Yep. And before he passed, we learned how he also had an opportunity to meet Thomas Edison. And so he had quite the life and experience at Ford. Unreal. Well, when the Bronco Underground got started, there was so much nostalgia for the vehicle. I mean, you know, going back to those old Broncos, the white grill and the two-tone paint, you know, the white top, it's like imprinted on my memory.

5:48And I know memories of a lot of other folks too. Of course, things had changed by the time the Bronco was being phased out. Tell us a little bit about the conversation in the years before it got discontinued. So the market was changing and you had vehicles like the Explorer that were really starting to become popular back in the mid-90s. And, you know, Explorer was selling, you know, approximately 400 ,000 plus vehicles a year. Wow, that's a lot. And, you know, it was four doors and a little bit more set up for a family. And so that whole part of the market was really exploding. and the more traditional kind of two-door Bronco part of the market was not nearly as big.

6:33Ultimately, you know, vehicles like the Expedition became kind of the better business play for companies like Ford to get into because that's really where most of the consumers were going to. I think everyone of a certain age can remember turning on the radio or turning on the TV, I believe it was 1994, and seeing a particular car chase being broadcast live from Los Angeles, The O.J. Simpson car chase. Roughly 18 police cars picking up Simpson's trail as he and another man, Al Cowling, rode along a Los Angeles freeway in that white Ford Bronco that you see in the center of the screen and that you see now turning into the driveway of O.J.

7:09Simpson's home. And I understand that there was sort of a run on white Broncos after that. But I'm wondering if maybe all the buzz around the Bronco kind of helped seal its fate. What was the inside talk there? Actually, the decision on Bronco's future was already set by that point. So the chase that everybody saw, including myself, did not determine the fate of the Bronco. It certainly brought a lot more awareness and attention and put that in people's memories. But the decision to switch over to vehicles like the Expedition had already been in motion at that point. Wow, that's really interesting.

7:46So it was no saving the Bronco. Its days were already numbered by the early to mid-90s. That's amazing. Yeah. So do you remember when you had heard the Bronco was going away? I don't, but coincidentally, my very first official day at Ford was the day that we built the last Bronco. It was June 12th of 1996, so quite a coincidence that happened. I'll say. So give us a little bit of the backstory of the formation of this on-the-down-low team, this Bronco Underground. Were you ever worried that maybe you'd get a wrist slap from the higher-ups? I mean, I can imagine some of the folks in the executive office thinking, wow, we don't want our employees to be obsessing over the Bronco when we've got some other models to roll out.

8:34Well, one funny story on that was I think it was probably around 2015, a position I was in. And one of our responsibilities was to propose what the future product lineup should be. And so we would do a lot of analysis and study of the customer and trends and competition, et cetera. And what we would keep coming to is that we needed a vehicle like the Bronco. And this was a study you would do every year. And we kept proposing, my team and I, that we would need a vehicle like the Bronco. And it became a little bit contentious over time because, again, every year we would keep saying, hey, there's an opportunity.

9:14We really need a vehicle like this. And we were literally forbidden for a while to use the Bronco word. We couldn't say the B word. And so we had to come up with alternative names for what this was. And everybody kind of knew we were basically saying we needed a Bronco. But you'd have to come up with different language on how to describe it because it was just, you know, getting tired in terms of, hey, what don't you understand, Mark? We're just not going to do a Bronco. And so we would just start calling it something else. So I guess we were a little bit stubborn on that, but it worked out. You know, it would have been really easy to take the Bronco nameplate and slap it on the side of an upscale Explorer or something, maybe a two-door Explorer or something like that.

10:00But amazingly, through it all, at a major corporation, right, like Ford, that didn't happen. And then when this vehicle makes its debut, you know, in its 2004 concept form, everyone is just floored. It's like, no way. This cannot happen. This will not happen, right? It's not going to look anything like the concept Bronco. People wouldn't believe that Bronco was truly going to come back. and they had seen the concept vehicle, but they didn't believe it was going to come back. And if it did come back, they were like, ah, Ford's going to screw it up. It's just not going to be right. And so you just felt, the entire team did, you just felt immense pressure of, we cannot screw this up.

10:46And yet what you see now, on the roads, the new version, you guys didn't stray very much from that vision. That does not happen very often in Detroit, does it? I don't think it does at all. I think that's one of the biggest miracles, if you want to call it that, of the whole story is how it delivered on the essence of what a Bronco is. I know the entire team is extremely proud of that fact. I mean, we would push ourselves to say, look, you can't just slap this name on another vehicle. And especially being out of the market, ultimately for 24, 25 years, you know, you can't disappoint the customers, the community that has been waiting and wanting this for so long.

11:36If you're going to do it, you have to do it right. You've got to do it right. Because, I mean, this could have been a fiasco. It could have been. And there were, you know, I think we saw recently where, you know, some competitors have put a name on a vehicle that, you know, in this space that didn't really seem to have the essence of its initial name. And we really spent an incredible amount of time understanding what is it going to take to do this vehicle right, to win in the marketplace. And we even went out and did some interesting research with customers because there was some internal debate of, is the Bronco name or the brand damaged?

12:17So the research that we did, we literally brought in customers. They had no idea that they were there for automotive research. And we just simply wrote the name Bronco on a flipboard on a piece of paper. And then we had those customers start to, they couldn't talk to each other. They just started writing down, you know, what they thought of that word. Was it the Denver Broncos? Was it the Ford Bronco? Was it a bucking horse? What was it? And they all started writing down, you know, different post-it notes about, you know, what that word meant to them. And then they started to, we had them create stories of the Bronco.

12:53And the stories, regardless of if they had experience with the Ford Bronco, was, you know, the Bronco, the imagery and what Bronco meant to them was extremely strong. And what we validated was there wasn't really any damage to the brand or the name Bronco, despite, you know, some of the notorious things that happened. And that just gave us further confirmation of, you know, what a wonderful opportunity we had with this brand that had such meaning and value to the customers. So, debut day comes. And I know you had a lot of people waiting online. What was going through your mind as the big reveal was getting set?

13:39You know, I look back at it and as challenging as it was to bring the Bronco back, the launch felt like it was almost as challenging. And I never would have expected that. But, you know, here it was, we were about to launch the Bronco. And, you know, after so many years and so many tries, you know, what a journey it was. And it's time to reveal it. And then COVID hits. and, you know, our plans to even reveal it, you know, in a public event, you know, with customers and media in person all got thrown out because, hey, it was COVID and you couldn't really do that. So, you know, we had to delay the reveal and then we had to completely rethink it in terms of it being more, you know, online.

14:25And so it was a complete 180 and, you know, Just like the whole story of Bronco and bringing it back, it was just another example of here's another obstacle, another hurdle. So we ended up, I think it was essentially the first fully online reveal of a vehicle during that period, or at least a major reveal. And so it went from, hey, we finally did it. And then as soon as it happened, it immediately, for me at least, switched where our website at Ford just completely blew up. There was so much traffic that it completely shut down our website, which pretty big website gets a lot of traffic. But we're trying to collect reservations for the new Bronco.

15:10And here it is, right? That's the exclamation point on this long process to bring it back. And all of a sudden, the website blows up. And people can't get their name in for the new Bronco because it just completely overwhelmed the website. And so I went from ecstasy to, again, here's another challenge of, what do we do now? Just admit it. You were freaking out that day. You had to have been. I was. I remember Jim Farley called me up right after the reveal, and it was like, congratulations. And I said, Jim, we got a problem here. The website just blew up. Oh, man. And so it went from the highest of highs to a little bit of a low, at least for me.

15:52So that created a whole nother challenge. For example, we had this first edition, which is like a limited edition, the first couple thousand we were going to build. And the website couldn't shut off the orders because they were coming in so fast. Oh, no. So, you know, hey, we're committed to we're going to build a certain number, but I couldn't shut off the order. So it's like, well, what do I do now? Do I go back and tell those people, sorry, you think you got one? But no, I'm sorry, we couldn't shut off the orders. And so we had to figure out what we were going to do on that. But it was just one thing after another in terms of what that extreme demand created on our side of, hey, now we got to bring this thing to market.

16:35And we got to figure out how to get these in customers' hands. Now, what is next for the Bronco? You know, I can't divulge any secrets at this point, but what I can assure you is that there's a great plan coming for the Bronco to keep it exciting with special editions and more variety. So there's lots of ideas and, you know, each year you'll see new versions of the Bronco and all of them will be true to that, you know, essence of Bronco and delivering on that capability and the open air experience for the Bronco. I guess that's the trick, right? If you want to innovate with a vehicle that's this iconic, you have to be really careful because you don't want to stray too far from the success that you've had so far.

17:23Right, right. Otherwise, you know, it may be a short-term gain that you might go after, but you really need to stay true to the essence of what that vehicle is. And I think the stars aligned in terms of why this one is just so successful. You know, we had the customer, we had the brand, we had the expertise, the market was asking for it, and it just needed an opportunity to bring that product to market. But, you know, there was great passion as well within the company to go deliver that. Mark Gruber is the Director of Vehicle Personalization at Ford and one of the members of the Bronco Underground movement that brought the classic SUV back to life.

18:06Mark, thanks so much for joining us on Business Wars. Thank you, David. Coming up, Larry Webster of Hagerty Media brings us up to speed on the SUV market of today. Stay with us.

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19:54Hey, welcome back to Business Wars. Ford and Jeep aren't the only companies making waves in the off-roading world. Of course, plenty of other manufacturers have tried to put their own unique spin on adventuring vehicles. Even electric car companies have gotten into the game, hoping to prove they can be just as tough as the old-school gas-powered ones. It's a wild world out there, and so to guide us through it, Larry Webster joins us. He's editor-in-chief of the automotive publication Hagerty Media. Larry, welcome to Business Wars. Hey, thanks for having me. Well, thanks for joining us. I know you've been covering the automotive world for years.

20:28I've been reading your writing. Hagerty Media is, well, it's become a sort of unofficial Bible in some respects for car enthusiasts. And I gather you're a self-described car nut yourself. Tell us a little bit more about your work at Hagerty and what you cover. Oh, yeah. At Hagerty, you know, we love all things cars. We focus on, let's say, vintage and classic cars, stuff you don't drive every day. And we want to serve that passion. And we do a magazine as part of the Hagerty Drivers Club. We have a YouTube channel with some 3 million subscribers, some 5 million follow us on our social channels.

21:00And we also do a whole bunch of free stuff on Hagerty.com. So anything you want to indulge about your car, hopefully we got you covered at Hagerty. I want to go a little deeper on you. I know you used to do some amateur racing and that kind of thing. Clearly, you have a passion for this. What was the moment that fueled that passion? What was your first car? First car was a 1984 Dodge Daytona Turbo Z. Ah. It's a beautiful car. I loved it, but it was sort of a piece of junk. And it didn't drive really well, but I didn't know any better. I thought it looked good. And then I sold it for, in college, a Rabbit GTI 1983 that I bought on one of the first internet bulletin boards at my college.

21:47And I drove that car and I immediately felt the difference. And the reason I bought it was all the stuff I had read in car magazines about how good that car was. And as soon as I experienced it and that light bulb connected, I was like, holy smokes, that is amazing. That what they could tell me really filtered into what I bought and what I enjoyed. I hear you had a 1980 FJ60 several years back. This is kind of a Land Cruiser style vehicle. Was it a Land Cruiser? Yeah, the Land Cruiser FJ60 was the generation. It's sort of a five-door wagon. It's basically a tall station wagon with four-wheel drive.

22:24It's really crude. I think they look great. But then I drove it around and it drove like a bus. What makes you decide to get it in the first place? I thought they're so cool. I mean, this off-road aesthetic that you've probably been talking about in your series here is people love it. And I get it. It just looks like individualistic and not ordinary. And, you know, I'm a risk taker. I'm off-road. I don't know. I remember the first SUV I got. I had a. What'd you get? I got a Ford Explorer two-door back when they first, you know, a couple of years after the first one came out. And I felt all grown up because now I had what all the adults had.

23:06You know what I mean? It was like, and every adult it seemed was going after these Explorers and the Blazer style. You know what I'm talking about? I mean, it seemed like right there in the early nineties or something like that. What did that car teach you, David? You know, it taught me not to, not to take turns too fast. almost learned the hard way. Yeah. They were tall and soft, right? Yeah, they were. Yeah, they were. They were not the off-road vehicles like the Jeep and the Bronco that we're talking about here. But did you ever take your Land Cruiser off-road? I mean, does a dirt road count?

23:43I mean, it just doesn't. No, I didn't. I mean, the myth of off-roading is that what you really need is ground clearance and very abrupt departure angles, which means really short overhangs or not a lot of distance between the wheels and the bumpers. And once you have that, a lot of not super sophisticated or heavy-duty four-wheel drive systems will get you where you need to go. It's just the real extreme rock crawling where some of these extreme Jeeps will pay off. So you think about this list of these off-road and quasi-off-road vehicles. Bronco and Jeep occupy this unique space, it seems to me.

24:20Look at the Jeep. I mean, it survived World War II. It survived recessions. It survived almost everything that's been thrown at it, including ownership changes through the years. And it's still, even as the Bronco was being nurtured as a kind of secret project at Ford, Jeep has always been there. What accounts for its longevity, do you think? I don't think I can answer that for certain. I can take a guess. And I think of it in parallel with the Ford Mustang. You know, they sold 22 ,000 of those the first day. And, you know, the competition jumped in within three years with the Camaro, the Challenger, the AMX, other cars of that.

25:03Firebird, yeah. Firebird. But by the time they showed up, there were like a million-ish used Mustangs available. So it just imprinted into the nation's youth quicker and harder than all the others. The Mustang is going on like gangbusters. It's really the only car that Ford still sells. And so I think of the Jeep, you know, they totally had first mover advantage. They didn't blow it. They sort of kept to its original ethos. That grille has not really changed. They're very protective over that seven bar grille for a reason. It tells you it's a Jeep, those circle headlights. They added models to the Jeep name, the Wagoneer.

25:40They had the pickup and they sort of, but they kept that basic, really hardcore off-roader throughout the decades. And they still sell it today as the Wrangler. So I think that was their strength. The Bronco, you know, has sort of gone full circle, started as a very kind of really capable off-roader, more like a agricultural implement than a car. You wouldn't really want to drive it more than 60 miles an hour. And then it got pickup based, a little more SUV based, comfortable. That was the one we saw OJ try and escape in. You probably remember that. Uh-huh. And then it too went away. And now they brought it back in a really smart way.