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.
“And then it wasn’t big enough and then everyone started to notice.”
He added that he understood the threat of new brands, having worked for Toyota in the 1980s and 1990s when the Japanese company rose from obscurity in the West to become the world’s largest automaker.
“My family was not happy,” he said. “And there was a huge social cost to Toyota’s success in the US Midwest, so many jobs were lost, including many people in my family.
“I can’t shake the fact that the ‘Detroit three’ [Ford, General Motors and Chrysler] never really had a plan. And we won’t miss this one.”
Ford, he said, had now set up a dedicated “skunkworks” team in California – separate from the rest of the company – to develop new EV models from scratch.
The team’s efforts are so secretive, Mr. Farley added, that even he had no access to their building.
“That’s how extreme a different approach we need to compete against BYD,” he said.
Ford currently has two electric vehicles available: the Mustang Mach-E crossover SUV; and F-150 Lightning pickup truck.
Sales of the F-150 rose 86% to 22,807 in the first nine months of 2024, while sales of the Mach-E rose 23% to 35,626, according to Kelly Blue Book registration data.
However, the company’s share of the overall EV market fell from 7.2% to 6.8% during that time.
By far the most dominant player remained Tesla, which sold 166,923 cars, although its market share also fell, from 49.8% to 48.2%.
Chinese brands face significant barriers in the US, not least 100% tariffs.
Asked about Mr Farley’s comments on Friday, a Ford UK spokesperson pointed to a post on social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, that he made following the interview.
“I try to drive everything we compete against,” he wrote. “I’ve done it my whole career. Specifications can tell part of a story, but you have to get behind the wheel to really understand and beat the competition.”
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