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Daily Inspiration: "Denial costs more than disruption ever will" - Futurist Jim Carroll

Are we witnessing the end phase of the auto industry's lost battle and the cost of cultural denial?

That might be the case. Watch this short video clip with Ford CEO Jim Farley at the recent DealBook summit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6uUdjKWgyU

His comments mirror what I've come to believe over the last few years - it brings me no joy to realize that it's pretty likely that the North American, German, and Japanese automotive industries have lost the battle for the future. I apologize for the bluntness of this assessment, but as a futurist, my role isn't to comfort - it's to confront reality. Given everything that has happened, and where we stand today, it seems to be an uncomfortable truth.

The implications, of course, are staggering.

What makes this loss particularly tragic is that it didn't have to happen. But somewhere along the way, transformative technologies like electric vehicles became casualties of the unprecedented cultural war. We've entered an era where scientific and technological progress has become entangled with identity politics, where choosing an electric vehicle isn't seen as an economic or environmental decision, but as a cultural statement. The same phenomenon has infected attitudes toward renewable energy, genomic science, and other breakthrough technologies that should represent economic opportunity rather than ideological battlegrounds.

I've posted about this before here, but the real implications are becoming more clear day by day.

The cost of this cultural warfare against the future isn't just measured in polar ice or parts per million of carbon - it's measured in trillion-dollar markets lost, in jobs never created, in innovations stunted. While we've been arguing about whether climate change is real, China has been building the future.

Farley's recent comments read like a case study of what happens when an industry awakens too late to a transformative shift.

It didn't have to happen. And in the weeks and months and years to come, the implications will become clear.

Futurist Jim Carroll tries to always bring a positive tone to his posts, but the staggering impact of some trends is just too big to ignore.

**#Disruption** **#Innovation** **#Future** **#Change** **#Automotive** **#Technology** **#Strategy** **#Competition** **#Denial** **#Transformation**

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https://jimcarroll.com/2025/01/daily-inspiration-denial-costs-more-than-disruption-ever-will/