Ford CEO Jim Farley has long made it quite clear that he views Chinese automakers as The Blue Oval’s chief rivals, based on the fact that the vehicles coming from that country these days are light years ahead in terms of quality and technology. In fact, Farley has gone so far as to say that Ford doesn’t have a future if it can’t figure out a way to compete with those Chinese rivals, even if none of them currently sell vehicles in the U.S. Recently, the executive touched on that particular subject once again.
“I went to [Executive Chairman] Bill Ford, the board, and my team. I said, ‘I love you guys, but I don’t think we can do this.’ The decision I arrived at, which was highly informed by meeting Doug Fields, was that we had to do it completely separately,” Farley said during a recent appearance on The Verge‘s Decoder podcast, speaking about the decision to bring in Fields as Ford’s chief EV, digital and design officer some time ago.
“Doug is a Model 3 chief engineer and worked on the car project at Apple. He was one of the first-generation software designers in AOS. He also designed the Segway early in his career. He’s been at the forefront of a lot of technology revolutions time and time again. I asked him, ‘Why can’t Ford do it?’ He’s like, ‘Jim, your part release system, your IT, your CAD design systems are 25 years uncompetitive. There’s no way you can beat BYD with that. You need real expertise.'”
It’s a pretty revealing admission from Farley, but also not surprising given his recent comments. Earlier this year, he also said that Chinese EVs and “their cost, their quality of their vehicles is far superior to what I see in the west,” referring to those companies The Blue Oval’s chief rivals. In this same interview, Farley also said that “the Chinese are the 700-pound gorilla in the EV industry,” adding “there’s no real competition from Tesla, GM, or Ford with what we’ve seen from China. It is completely dominating the EV landscape globally and more and more outside of China.”
Certainly not something we see every day.
Changes to the passenger's seat, but not the driver's.
It appeared in a movie and a TV series.
