The boss of US car giant Ford has admitted he “doesn’t want to give up” an electric vehicle (EV) from one of his Chinese rivals after driving it for six months.
Jim Farley, Ford’s CEO since 2000, said he had arranged for his own Xiaomi SU7 to be returned from Shanghai to Chicago after his trips to China.
In an interview with the Electrify Everything Show, hosted by former Red Dwarf actor Robert Llewellyn, Mr Farley said: “Everyone is talking about the Apple car, but the Xiaomi car – which now exists and is fantastic – is 10,000 to 20,000 sold per month. .
“They’ve been sold out for six months. Wow. You know, that’s an industry juggernaut.
“I don’t really like to talk about the competition, but I drive the Xiaomi – we flew one from Shanghai to Chicago and I’ve been driving it for six months now and I don’t want to give it up.”
Commenting on his unusual admission, the CEO added: “I’m doing well [say that] because I think this was all something that I processed, that we processed as a team.
“And we were not naive in that [do that].”
He described experiencing “epiphanies” during his visits to China, after seeing and trying out high-tech cars now produced by electronics giant Xiaomi, as well as other rivals such as BYD, Neo, SAIC and Geely.
In China, electric car sales have now accounted for more than half of all new car sales for several months in a row.
The success of electric cars in the communist country has been partly attributed to plans the government put in place more than a decade ago to dominate all aspects of the technology’s supply chain, as well as state subsidies.
China’s rise in the EV market has thrown more traditional rivals in America and Europe into turmoil, with major manufacturers such as Volkswagen, Renault, General Motors and Ford now trying to catch up.
Mr Farley pointed to this, as well as the sheer size of the Chinese market, as reasons why China now ‘dominates’ electric vehicle production.
“Companies like BYD were very small when they started their journey,” he told the podcast.
“They’re much bigger than Tesla now – they’re the biggest in the world… And you know, they are [intellectual property] that the rest of the world has not developed. It’s not the old days where someone would copy a Western technology – the opposite is true.
“That happened ten years ago and now everyone sees it on the street in front of their house. But it didn’t happen overnight. The market was big enough for the last six or seven years that none of these companies had to export.
