Jim Farley, CEO of Ford, is a very interesting guy. He once mortgaged his house to buy a vintage car and he said that American consumers need to be buying more cars that Ford doesn’t sell. You can never quite predict what he’ll do next. He might, for example, import a Chinese-built Xiaomi SU7 for competitive benchmarking, use it as a daily driver, then go on a podcast and talk about how much he loves it.
Farley did exactly this earlier this week on the podcast Fully Charged, from the YouTube channel Everything Electric Show. He heaped praise on the SU7, calling the competing car “fantastic” and saying he “[didn’t] want to give it up.”
It’s fantastic ... That is an industry juggernaut, and a consumer brand that is much stronger than car companies. I don’t like talking about the competition so much, 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.
American automakers and lawmakers have both been fearful of Chinese EVs potential to undercut American offerings and impact sales. Farley seems to have found genuine reason for that concern — the Chinese car he’s been driving really is just that good.
It remains to be seen what position Chinese automakers will stake in the American market but it seems the cars themselves are a genuine challenge to the Big Three. If Chinese EVs start showing up on our shores, our domestic automakers might have to start making better cars that sell for less money in order to compete. That’d be just terrible, right?
Update 10/25/2024 10:00 AM: Ford reached out with a tweet from Farley to clarify that the Xiaomi isn’t an exception — Farley often drives competing vehicles for benchmarking. The tweet is included here.