EVWire brief: Ford Chief Executive, Jim Farley, says he has flown to China with his leadership team several times now to study the Chinese EVs. They even fly 4-5 of them back home to Detroit to “drive the crap out of them” and disassemble, then reassemble them.
Jim says seeing how far Chinese EVs are is "the most humbling thing he has ever seen”. We’ll also learn from his take on autonomy (siding with Waymo over Tesla for L4) and how they’re targeting affordable EVs and commercial EVs, not the large SUVs.
Jim Farley says the Chinese EVs are far ahead
Jim says, in the interiew at the Aspen Ideas Festival (below), that he has been to China 5-6 times now.
"It's the most humbling thing I have ever seen. 70% of all EVs in the world are made in China. They have far superior in-vehicle technology. Huawei and Xiaomi are in every car. You get in, you don't have to pair your phone. Automatically, your whole digital life is mirrored in the car. You have an AI companion you can talk to. Automatic payment is already there, you can buy movie tickets, it has facial recognition so it knows who’s in which seat and which media you like.”
Isaacson asks why don’t Ford cars have that. Farley says it’s because Google and Apple decided not to go into the car business.
“Beyond that, their cost, their quality of their vehicles is far superior to what I see in the West. We are in a global competition with China, and it's not just EVs. And if we lose this, we do not have a future Ford."
Here is the video of the interview with Jim Farley from Aspen Ideas Festival, hosted by Walter Isaacson. I’ve timestamped it for you for 12:09 for the key bit where Farley starts talking about his trips to China
Jim says, on their EV production, they are “changing its profile in line with the demand. We’ve been #2 after Tesla for three years. But we’re also #3 in hybrids.”
Ford’s affordable vehicle will bet on LFP
“We’re putting more energy and investment into hybrid, and we’re redirecting our capital, we saw what happened in this first inning of EVs. We’re going super-affordable, and commercial. We’re not going to be investing in $50k-$60k SUVs. $30k EVs, and commercial EVs. Because that’s where we think the market is going.”
I was surprised to hear Jim say that there aren’t many affordable vehicles, almost none, and then bring out the ones that are on the market are compliance cars to get EV credits and keep selling trucks. They’re not great cars, he says. And he is correct on it all.
He says there’s a project in the company he hopes to talk about soon where “we’re going to build the Model T of EVs with a small group of a Skunkworks team in California.” Just like Henry Ford did back in the day for the V8.
Jim confirms that this affordable car will be built in America. He does go on to say how important it would be to be able to import the necessary components.
Isaacson also asked a great question:
“Do you think you can compete with BYD in the affordability field?”
“The key is innovation. We did our homework on BYD. They’re the global leader on EV volume. And we found a lot of opportunities. One example, American EVs don’t use LFP batteries [goes on to explain benefits of LFP], and China bet on LFP, the west bet on NMC.
One of the things we bet on is to move to LFP. But the IP is in China. So we had to localize the IP in Michigan, and that is very difficult.”
Ford and autonomy
In this talk, Isaacson also asked Farley about Ford’s autonomous approach. He said Ford is still working on developing a more advanced system, which will allow drivers to not pay attention during certain times on the highway. But it no longer has intentions to build a fully autonomous, Level 4 system - they took all the funding for that program and really focused on the highway problem.
For the Level 4, Jim answered “Yes, but I won’t go any further than that” when Isaacson asked whether he has talked to Elon about it. On Tesla and Waymo:
“We recognize that both of them have made a lot of progress.”
Isaacson asked which one makes more sense to them, Tesla or Waymo.
“To us, Waymo. We really feel, for our brand - people trust Ford - and when you have a brand like Ford when there’s a new technology you have to be really careful. […] We really believe that a LiDAR is mission-critical.
Farley says they have just reached 40 million miles of hands-free driving on the highways.
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How they bring Chinese EVs to Detroit to study them
I’ve also timestamped 35:22 for the key bit about bringing EVs back from China — Isaacson asks why Farley has visited China 5-6 times now, is he “trying to find a joint venture there, buy BYD or what. This is off the record.” ( sidenote, got to love Walter Isaacson as interviewer 🤣 ):
“I go for a couple of reasons. I bring my whole leadership team, we don’t leave anyone behind.
First thing we do is we get the last hundred cars that launched there and we drive as many as we can. Then we pick the four or five that we love, and then we put them on the plane and fly them back to Detroit. And then we drive the crap out of them and we take them apart and we put them back together.
[Farley also confirms he tests Tesla, its FSD and Waymo back home the same way]
[…] People don’t realize that China has IP that America needs. I think we just need to be more humble as a country, that they do things really well that we need to learn.
And how we learn is through joint ventures and cooperations and partnerships, but we can’t be so obsessed with China as an enemy that we aren’t humble enough to set up those business structures and then have people in those companies in those JVs that transfer the knowledge and the knowhow back to the home country, to the home company, Ford.”
This reminds me of when Farley said back in October 2024 in a Fully Charged interview: “I have been driving the Xiaomi SU7 EV in Chicago for six months now, and I don’t want to give it up!”
Source of the interview: The Aspen Institute
Jaan’s note: For quite a while now I’ve been waiting to hear which Chinese EV maker does Ford partner up with. From this interview it seems that Farley is still betting a lot on its skunkworks’ team to figure out the affordable EV. What we can say from watching the rest of the industry, though, is that going LFP alone isn’t the silver bullet. As usual, we’ll keep an eye on any developments.
What’s the EV future of Ford going to be like? Let us know in the comments: 👇
