Ford CEO doesn’t “want to give up” the Chinese EV he drives
China sells more than half of the world’s EVs, and carmakers in the West are catching up by driving them.
CEOs rarely admit that they use their competitors’ products. But Jim Farley, the CEO of Ford, said that he flew a Xiaomi electric vehicle from Shanghai to Chicago, and has been driving it for the past six months.
“I don’t want to give it up,” he said while talking to Robert Llewellyn in the Everything Electric Show.
Xiaomi — a Chinese phone company — released its first EV called Xiaomi SU7 in March. It retails for under 25 million yuan (about $35,000) in China, despite a Porsche-like exterior. It includes a system that connects with Xiaomi’s other smart-home devices. Social-media hype has brought significant interest in the vehicle even before Xiaomi was able to deliver them, resulting in more than 88,000 lock-in orders by the end of April.
The company has delivered more than 27,000 vehicles during the second quarter of 2024 and is expecting to deliver 100,000 vehicles by November. Total revenue from the EV maker was 6.2 billion yuan ($870 million). Xiaomi does not currently sell its EVs outside of China.
But this is not the first Chinese EV that impressed Farley. He told The Wall Street Journal in May that he also arranged the shipment of a $77,000 electric minivan from Li Auto to Michigan. Called the Mega, the seven-seater was Li Auto’s first fully electric model, featuring leg rests, fold-flat seats, a movie screen, and an AI assistant.
Zooming out, Farley warned that China’s dominance in the EV market is a threat to the West. But to compete with the likes of BYD, he wanted Ford to take a different approach.
“The traditional industrial company — look at VW with MEB — and so many other companies in the West that tried to compete in China and now are just adopting Chinese platforms because they couldn’t do it. We all saw that coming and so we said we got to take a different approach,” he said in the podcast.
