Ford CEO Jim Farley wants to get rid of his Chinese-developed Xiaomi SU7. And now he admits that the Chinese are 10 years ahead with electric cars.
Ford director Jim Farley believes that China is ten years ahead of the United States when it comes to the development and production of electric cars.
Ford faces a significant challenge from the Chinese auto industry, and according to Farley, it is necessary to draw on Chinese know-how to compete.
Farley told The New York Times that China has a significant advantage in battery production for electric vehicles, and he believes Ford's only chance to catch up and surpass the Chinese auto industry is by leveraging their technology.
– The way we compete with them is by gaining access to their technology. Just like they needed ours 20 years ago.
Then we can use our innovative ecosystem and American ingenuity and our large scale and our intimacy with the customer to beat them (the Chinese, ed.) globally, Farley told NYT .
– It will be one of the most important races to save our industrial economy.
Farley isn't talking about a distant future plan, but about something that's already underway. The automaker's massive BlueOval Battery Park is under construction.
And when it is completed in 2026, it will produce thousands of lithium iron phosphate (LFP, ed.) batteries based on technology from the Chinese CATL.
This is already known. But there is one aspect of CATL's battery chemistry that may not be as widely known: It was originally developed in the US and then acquired by the Chinese for a modest sum.
Citing a previous story in Bloomberg, the NYT explains how LFP technology was discovered by researchers at the University of Texas and then commercialized by A123 Systems LLC, a start-up that received significant financial support from the Obama administration.
However, the electric car market developed slowly and A123 went bankrupt. The remnants of the company, including the battery technology, were eventually acquired by what was then China's largest auto component company: CATL.
It can be argued that it's easy to be backward-thinking, and that no one could have really predicted ten years ago that electric cars would become such a big part of the automotive industry. However, the Chinese did.
Tesla did it for any other Western car brand, too. All major automakers worked on electric cars because they knew that at some point they would have to sell them in large quantities to meet emissions targets.
Ford is now in a situation where they have to catch up. And they are not alone. Volkswagen also recently admitted that they are lagging behind their competitors. Read more about it here .
