Ford boss reluctant to give up his Chinese Xiaomi SU7 ‘test car’

Jim Farley, Ford’s CEO and boss of the world’s sixth-biggest car company, with 177.000 people working for him, made a striking confession: He has been driving a Chinese Xiaomi SU7 fully electric car around Detroit for the last six months and doesn’t want to give it up.

“It’s fantastic and is made by a smartphone juggernaut. The Apple car Apple failed to make in the US,” he told British actor Robert Llewellyn on the Fully Electric Show podcast. Farley repeated – as a ‘car guy’ – that he ‘loves e-cars’ and that EVs will be the future even though this will need educating the general public to make informed decisions.

Llewellyn (68) is a British actor, comedian, presenter and writer. He plays the mechanoid Kryten in the sci-fi television sitcom Red Dwarf and formerly presented the engineering gameshow Scrapheap Challenge, among others.

He interviewed Jim Farley about the challenge of Chinese competition in a 43-minute podcast. Farley was very straightforward in admiring how the Chinese car industry managed to rethink the electric future decades ago while the rest of the world was ‘sleeping’, in a matter of speaking.

Farley has visited China several times and confessed that after his last trip, he had a Xiaomi SU7 shipped from Shanghai to Detroit to ‘test drive’ it over the previous six months. He made no secret of his admiration for a smartphone company pulling off the job of creating a fully electric car that sold out in its homeland, China, immediately.

Diehard petrol head

Being a diehard ‘petrol head’ for all of his life and still owning a 1973 Bronco, a 1936 Lincoln 12-cylinder, and a 1928 4.5 liter Bentley himself, he said loving electric cars for “the joy of driving coming back”. It’s not even a rational thing, he said.

He’s convinced people will eventually embrace EVs and sees the current hype about returning to hybrid cars as an intermediate step for people to discover the advantages of going electric. People tend to choose the most effortless way, things they know, like the combustion engine, and no worries about range, but this will change.

Bigger batteries are a mistake

Farley believes the auto industry has to undergo a mind shift to make that happen, from always bigger ICE cars that are the easiest to make a profit to smaller and cheaper EVs. Electric vehicles have 40% fewer components and are far less vulnerable to irreparable failure than complex combustion engines.

Still, the most expensive part of an EV is the battery. Farley says that Western carmakers have made a mistake by making EVs with always bigger batteries for a more extended range to soothe clients’ range anxiety. Bigger batteries mean more weight and need more energy to move them, so it’s a vicious spiral.

Focusing on cheaper LFP

While Western EV makers focused on high-density—but expensive—NMC batteries, the Chinese, like BYD, which happened to be a fairly small company ten years ago, focused on cheaper LFP batteries.

Those have less energy density, fewer range capabilities, and no expensive rare materials like cobalt and nickel. They are less prone to fire hazards, and new techniques have made them more compact to reach the same range levels as NMC batteries, like BYD’s blade battery, for instance.

Jim Farley boldly states that Ford—like other Western carmakers—must reinvent itself to compete with the Chinese, who have learned to work far more efficiently in building electric cars.

Skunkworks team

That’s why Ford created a so-called ‘skunkworks’ team in California to develop an entirely new low-cost platform for electric vehicles. That team consists of people coming from Tesla, and Apple, among others, but also lots of engineers from the Formula One scene in Europe. In F1, efficiency in weight, aerodynamics, and the very last tech come together, Farley points out.

One reason the Chinese, like BYD, can make affordable EVs is that they produce all the components in-house. The West has refined the ICE technique over the last 100 years and made it cheap by sourcing thousands of components worldwide.

They count on ‘just-in-time delivery’ to keep production going, but that is also the industry’s Achilles heel. Farley gives the example of seats being made for Ford just over the river in Detroit, over the border in Canada. Those are produced 40 minutes before Ford needs them on the production line. When the bridge is closed for whatever reason, Ford has to halt its production.

Vulnerable just-in-time deliveries

Another example is the dependency on thousands of computer chips for all kinds of systems in a modern combustion engine car. This became painfully clear during and after the COVID pandemic when the lack of chips halted the car industry except for Tesla, which has engineered its cars to be far less dependent on those chips.

Farley says the Chinese realized more than a decade ago that they had to rethink the way cars are made and, in the meantime, took a lead of two lengths in electronics and software development.

He saw history repeat itself as he started working in the automotive sector for Toyota, an unknown company with 500 people working for the brand in the US in those days. Farley remembers being shunned by part of his own family for working for the Japanese, while several of them lost their jobs in American car companies around Detroit.

He is convinced Ford won’t make the mistake of underestimating the competition again and sees the Ford family as supporting him in that belief.