When you work for a car company, there are certain rules. If you’re an executive, for example, it’s often written in your contract that you should only be seen driving your own company’s product. These rules don’t appear to apply to Ford CEO Jim Farley, however. He’s been getting about in something very un-Ford-like, indeed.
Farley spoke on the matter on the Everything Electric Show, an EV podcast on YouTube. A conversation began comparing the long-rumored Apple car project with the cars built by Chinese smartphone manufacturer, Xiaomi. Where the world’s biggest tech company failed to put anything into production, Xiaomi has real EVs driving around on Chinese streets today.
The real revelation, though? Farley himself has been driving around in one, and what’s more—he’s into it!
Know Thine Enemy
“The Xiaomi car… which now exists, and it’s fantastic… they sell 10,000, 20,000 a month, they’re sold out for six months, that is an industry juggernaut,” says Farley. He notes how impressive the Xiaomi effort has been. “I don’t like talking about the competition so much, but I drive the Xiaomi,” he says, dropping the bombshell. “We flew one from Shanghai to Chicago and I’ve been driving it for six months now, and I don’t wanna give it up.”
The car in question is the Xiaomi SU7. It’s an electric sports sedan, and is available in three trims—SU7, SU7 Pro, and SU7 Max. The naming scheme is not dissimilar to what you’d find in the smartphone market. The base model delivers 295 horsepower to the rear wheels, while the dual-motor, all-wheel-drive SU7 Max comes with a mighty 664 horsepower on tap. It does zero to 60 mph in under 2.8 seconds and can hit a top speed of 165 miles per hour.
The Xiaomi isn’t just fast in a straight line, either. It’s built to handle, too, and it even has an active rear wing. It’s got a serious sporting tilt—the company directly compared it to the Porsche Taycan upon its announcement late last year. Meanwhile, the drag coefficient is claimed at 0.195, making it perhaps the slipperiest EV currently on sale.
This is a bit of an outlier move for an auto executive. Typically, it’s part of their job to be seen flying the flag for their own company by driving the home brand product. However, Farley makes it his business to sample a wider range of vehicles on the market. He took to Twitter to comment, stating that “you’ve got to get behind the wheel to truly understand and beat the competition.
I try to drive everything we compete against. Have done it my whole career. Specs can tell part of a story, but you’ve got to get behind the wheel to truly understand and beat the competition.
— Jim Farley (@jimfarley98) October 23, 2024
Jim highlights that the US auto industry is facing an imminent challenge from Chinese automakers, and it’s a big one. He likens it to the upheaval when Japanese imports took the market by storm so many decades ago. “We did look the other way, and why is that the case?” he asks.
Farley explains what it was like to observe this seismic shift from his position in the auto industry. “When I joined Toyota in the US, there were 500 people at the company, and we were like a marginal brand, no one even knew of us,” he says.
That changed quickly as Toyota’s quality affordable cars won customers over in short order—but that success came at a personal cost for Farley. “My family was not happy, they wouldn’t talk to me here in Detroit because they were ashamed that I worked there,” he explains. “There was a huge social cost in the Midwest of the US for the success of Toyota… so many jobs were lost, including many people in my family.”
Ultimately, Farley’s goal is to learn from the past and not make those same historic mistakes. “I can’t unlearn the fact that the Detroit [Big Three] never really had a plan,” he says. “We’re not gonna miss this one, Bill Ford and I shook hands… we said this one, we’re gonna have to get it right from scratch.”
To that end, Ford established a “Skunkworks” operation down in California to tackle the threat of Chinese competition head-on. “I felt like the institution of Ford would have a really tough time competing with BYD,” explains Farley. “We needed a ground-up team with a similar approach as Kelly Johnson’s [Lockheed] SR-71 Blackbird Skunkworks.”
It’s a top-secret operation, to the point that Farley notes his own badge doesn’t work at the facility. “I can’t even get into the building,” he jokes. “That’s how extreme of an approach we needed to compete against BYD.” He notes that the traditional automakers have thus far struggled to adapt to the challenges from modern Chinese upstarts, and thus Ford is taking unique measures to tackle the problem. “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,” he says. “We all saw that coming and said, we gotta take a different approach.”
Seeing the Ford CEO driving a vehicle from a Chinese competitor might make some stuffed shirts and shareholders uncomfortable. Fundamentally, though, it’s sound practice. In the words of Sun Tzu: “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.”
Image credits: Ford, Xiaomi
Farley can drive any car for up to a year and you can, too! Unless this has been changed in the last 20 years, you have to apply with (IIRC) the NHTSA and maybe the EPA and you get to import it and drive it for a year. End of the year, you need to show proof that it was exported or destroyed. How you get it registered, IDK.
He has been driving what now? A 4 door sedan? And commenting about how good it is and how the company cant make enough.
If you go to look at what hos company offers to compete – there is nothing, because they decided not to make cars anymore.
Or as has been said, half measures get us nowhere (eg, Mach-e, C-Max, etc).
The C-Max was just an EPA ploy, but in what way is the Mach-e a “half-measure”?
In the USA. They still sell the Focus, Taurus, and Lincoln Z overseas.
Well, he’s driving it in the USA, so there’s that…
I don’t know why they’d have to put a tariff on them, just make them illegal to import, register and plate. Same effect, but no tech bros driving them to show off how much money they make…….
Trump has tariffs on the brain, all they do is make things ultimately more expensive for the US consumer. That’s what happened the first time he was driving the bus, made aluminum and steel 25% more expensive, and what was made with those products? Stuff we buy, which now cost a minimum of 25% more to make. There are better ways…..
The front end seems very narrow for a sedan of this size. I have to wonder if this is purely a design decision, or a side-effect of not having to comply with strict front-end crash safety standards. It makes the front of the car look *very* sleek and sporty, but I wonder if additional crumple-zone material was the sacrifice to make this happen.
The most obvious thing to me here is that…I’m looking at a Chinese 4 door sedan here. Yet I’ve been told that nobody wants those, apparently we only want SUVs. So that will never sell right. Wait, Tesla almost only sell sedans too…so is GM and Ford wrong there too? I guess I’ll just keep driving my Camry till they decide.
Use your favorite search engine and look up the Xiaomi SUV.
I’m referring to the picture in the article above, is that too complicated?
I hate to break it to you and the picture in the article above, but the Model Y outsells the Model 3 more than 2 to 1.
I don’t think you understand how incredibly varied the Chinese car market is. There are so many SUV models. In fact someone already made a SUV version of this car.
Xiaomi SU7 copycat spotted in China, nicknamed Redmi SU7 (carnewschina.com)
I don’t see how America can compete with chinese labor and lack of environmental regulations. It’s just not possible.
I hate the orange clown, but he was totally correct about increasing tariffs on goods made in china; imho they should be even higher. There should be a HUGE incentive to produce things nationally, instead of shipping so many jobs overseas for the benefit of a few executives.
Environmentalists get really upset when I point out that the best piece of environmental policy that could have been enacted in recent history is Trump’s attempt to tariff the fuck out of China and stop importing all of their dirt cheap disposable shit.
Credit where credit is due, the Biden admin pushing for de minimis reform, specifically targeting Shein and Temu is VERY welcome, and loooooong overdue. I still find it insulting that UPU rules mean I can ship a 2kg brick from China for like 1/4 the cost of shipping it across town in the US. This is US taxpayers directly subsidizing Chinese imports, and it’s ridiculous that it hasn’t been renegotiated.
Kind of off topic but Tariffs aren’t the end-all be-all solution here. All they do is make goods more expensive and act as an additional tax the American people have to pay. If you put a high tariff on Chinese goods and there isnt a domestic equivalent, then all you did was make it more expensive for someone in the US to buy that good with the extra funds from the tariffs going to the US Gov.
You also have to think about the fact that even if there is a domestic equivalent, the American people would see the price of that good increase. If there was a tariff on that 2k brick you mentioned, you’d just be forced to to pay 4x the cost to get hat US brick because the 2k brick from China would be artificially inflated to be more expensive than the US equivalent.
In the short term, yes, and pro free-trade economists usually stop here with their “tariffs always bad” model. But there is more to the equation- tariffs also create a demand for cheap domestic supply, and in the case of manufacturing that’s probably a good domestic market to encourage. The ‘rona exposed the structural weaknesses of the global supply chain and that supply chain risk was probably not adequately priced in for most companies, which is one contributor to inflation being so bad over recent years.
Also, the discussion is about tariffs in the context of the environment- I know of no environmental regulation that is not ultimately passed on to consumers in the form of increased prices. If we’re serious about addressing environmental concerns, cheap goods manufactured with little regard to environmental regulations are something that need to be phased out, tariffs are one way to encourage that.
Domestic manufacturing on the scale needed will take a while and I don’t think most people will be patient enough to wait for it to happen while they’re paying the increased prices for heavily tariffed goods.
Tariffs are definitely not a blanket solution. They are both an economic and policy tool to shape a countries place in the world and its competitive advantage. Some tariffs and export controls (semi-conductor, AI, aerospace, batteries, steel) are arguably worth the costs incurred in the interest of national competitive advantage. Other countries do the same thing to the US, particularly on agricultural imports, in the interest of keeping a strategic local industry intact.
We can stop buying anything made at the FoxConn factory, for example, or pay twice as much.
It depends on what you’re buying. Most of the price tag on an iPhone are the components, not the labor. Those components are made in SMT factories that have very, very few people.
I am an environmentalist and I work in Trade. I strongly agree with your take, regardless of my feelings about Trump. When you have a country subsidizing state owned enterprises, tariffs are the only way to shape behavior and create a level playing field for competition.
I get the point, but we aren’t talking about a Changli being screwed together by mom, pop and their kids in a dirt floor warehouse like you see in TikTok videos.
This is much, much bigger than the surface level advantages of Chinese production and supply chains.
We’re talking about a car that undercuts the price of a base Chinese Tesla Model 3, while offering performance and design features more in line with the Porsche Taycan, and massive range.
Now obviously the Xaiomi doesn’t exactly have Porsche fit and finish, but the fact that they’re producing something vaguely comparable is staggering. Especially considering the Tesla has all the same advantages of Chinese labour and supply chain.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from my work, you can’t nickel and dime your way to a better finished product. At best, that approach gives with something slightly worse for less money. But we’re not talking about a worse Tesla Model 3- Quite the contrary. What Xiaomi have achieved with the SU7 is damn impressive, and there is no way they could have done it without a massive leap forward in automated manufacturing.
Ultimately Jim Farley realizes Xiaomi could set up factories to produce vehicles like the SU7 competitively on any continent, dodging tariffs designed to keep out Chinese imports. The only way legacy automakers can defend themselves in the long term is to legitimately compete and improve their designs and manufacturing process. Which is why Ford probably has a dozen of these SU7s in various states of disassembly all over their R&D facilities.
I haven’t had a chance to drive them, but I’ve gotten to poke and prod the full Xiaomi lineup, sit in them, and play with the entertainment system. The offered features and interior feel is significantly better than Tesla. The interiors are much closer to what you would find in a new Volvo. I think your assessment on manufacturing approach and sourcing is spot on.
That said, I recently drove an AIWAY U5 in Spain. It was a sad, grim, piece of shit that got 50% of its advertised range and felt like it was built from TEMU parts. With a €40K price tag, it was proof that the Chinese can make an EV worse than Tesla if they put their minds to it.
It will be interesting to see what comes of it.
If Xiaomi /BAIC can produce a passable near-luxury electric sports car for average US new-car prices, it can be extrapolated that they should have no trouble producing an acceptable compact sedan or CUV for even less money- Perhaps even making a profit in the process.
It has recently been confirmed that Tesla has no intention of producing a $25,000 economy car- Supposedly due to their ideology of robots being the ‘true future’ of affordable mobility.
I have to wonder if this is more to do with Tesla hitting their ceiling of mass-market manufacturing expertise. (With the undermining of public transit initiatives a nice side bonus.)
The only Chinese-branded automobiles I’ve had any experience with, were a few compact CUVs we rented, or rode in during a trip to Peru. The experience was basically ~2015 RAV4, but with horrible NVH, and everything in the interior seemed to be falling apart, like a 2000s Chrysler product.
So yeah, it’s easy to see why Western automakers haven’t been to worried about what the Chinese brands are up to until quite recently
One of the things that Tesla and the Chinese figured out that is still knee capping every other automaker is SKU proliferation. Xiaomi, BYD and Tesla cars usually come in 2 or 3 trims with no added features or options.
The F-150 Lightning comes in ~71,000 permutations. The mess this causes isn’t just in FATP, but stretches back into planning, procurement, inventory availability, testing and quality.
While the consumer in me wants every car to come with an available manual and as much choice as possible in features rather than trim levels, it’s really clear that you can squeeze cost out of a supply chain by limiting SKU proliferation.
That’s one of the few policy things I ever thought he was on the right track with, but the way he did it was so bad that he somehow managed to make the communist dictatorship with a history of human rights violations look like the victim.
Fun fact: Tesla received the most subsidies of any car manufacturer in China. I wonder what Elon gave in exchange.
honestly, I have heard stories of competitors offering Benchmarking mules since the 60’s. sometimes, seemingly simple stuff these days was exceedingly hard to replicate it seemed.
So if you’re a CEO of a car company the 25 year rule doesn’t apply?
Cool!
OK, whose up for taking over Stellanis and bringing over ALL the fun cars?
There’s a few ways to do this legally but it’s expensive which wouldn’t be a problem for Farley.
He could have it federalized – he’d have to have a couple crash tested to be sure they meet US standards. It’s an EVA so it most likely meets EPA requirements. He could also import it for Show and Display in which case he’s limited to 2,500 miles which is certainly enough to get a taste of what the car is like.
Doubtful any of that happened as its not mentioned.
Doubtful that a guy that makes $26.5 million as the CEO of a $274 billion company opened himself up to criminal liability by violating federal laws and announcing it publicly when he could have used one of many legal avenues to import this car.
I doubt it too which is why I’m sure it was brought in using a legal path not available to 99.999% of Americans.
It’s not that sinister. 99.9% of Americans aren’t an OEM. We provide certain privileges to industry to advance technology.
“We provide certain privileges to industry to copy technology.”
FIFY
It must be a true bummer to be so cynical but what’s really unnecessary is the urge to bring the rest of us down.
Cynical? What else would they be doing with that car? It’s not like they’re testing it for US road certification.
Why would another OEM be testing a vehicle for US road certification? They’re benchmarking it. They do it all the time, every single manufacturer does. He’s not just driving it for ha-has.
Call it “benchmarking”, call it “cribbing, call it “paraphrasing” or “inspired by”, whatever you like.
“Why would another OEM be testing a vehicle for US road certification?”
Hypothetically? To rebrand it as a Ford. If you can’t beat them, join them amirite?
Tell me you don’t know how the automotive industry works without saying as much…
If you say so. I expect this car will be demolished as per the import guidelines but in a way that maximizes the potential to “benchmark” key tech.
I’m certain Farley is just using manufacturer plates.
OEMs have always had certain exemptions for testing purposes, same reason they can drive pre-production vehicles on the road (or you might get foreign market vehicles using Death Valley or Arizona for hot weather testing). I remember seeing 300 Tourings (the Euro market Magnum with 300 front end) on Chrysler’s Auburn Hills campus about 20 years ago, and found a VW Transporter leaving VW’s Arizona facility on Google Maps a few months back.
https://www.google.com/maps/@33.0358794,-111.9447723,3a,34.3y,45.85h,85.29t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sEhvJGVpw48UTg7s84_xETg!2e0!5s20230301T000000!7i16384!8i8192?coh=205409&entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI0MTAyMS4xIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D
Yeah, buried somewhere in my camera roll is pictures of an acid green Suzuki Jimny inside the FCA Executive Parking deck wearing M plates. The OEMs buy competitor vehicles all the time, and have pretty good leeway on driving them around for competitive bench marking.
Which would make sense if it was more than just the CEO driving it. The engineers who design Fords should be driving it, the workers who assemble cars should be driving it, the accountants should drive it too. Everyone should also be switching between that and whatever Ford’s closest equivalent is.
That’s proper research.
As it is this just looks like privilige.
It’s a multi-billion dollar company. Pretty sure they can afford a few.
That said, I wouldn’t be opposed to bookmarking this for two or three years from now, and having someone constantly harangue Farley if Ford doesn’t have a competitive product on market at that time.
Sounds like a plan.
I mean, we don’t know if Ford’s engineers haven’t been tearing into the car when Farley isn’t driving it. Corporations are allowed an exemption to the 25 year rule for testing, benchmarking, evaluation, and even for display, so technically Farley is on the up and up.
It’s also why you’ll sometimes see stuff like a Renault Twizy for sale just outside of Detroit. They get imported for testing, and then dumped without titles. And yeah, it’s just another example of why the 25 year rule is so stupid..
You’re right, we don’t. I guess we’ll never know unless it ends up in a junkyard because some engineer couldn’t put Humpty back together again.
More people are involved in bringing a vehicle to market than just engineers. There is no doubt that whatever avenue Farley used, he is legally driving that car. There is no reason to die on this hill.
I never said it was brought in illegally. The opposite in fact. I pointed out that a CEO of a car company can (legally) bring in whatever car they want for *reasons*.
He doesn’t say WHERE he’s been driving it. Could be on a closed track somewhere. And there was probably a steep price on bringing over a few of them for “research” purposes.
Anyway, Ford could make the exact same car here (add some required safety shit), but they’d have to pay their workers, and the auto plant would not be subsidized by the government.
“they’d have to pay their workers, and the auto plant would not be subsidized by the government.”
Sure it would:
https://www.energy.gov/articles/biden-harris-administration-announces-nearly-2-billion-support-american-auto-workers
Noted.
OEMs import and drive cars here all the time. Around Detroit, you see a lot of forbidden fruit with an “M plate” on them. If the car is registered to a manufacturer and being used for legit research, there are no restrictions.
“being used for legit research”
Therein lies the rub. As a consumer I need to do “legit research” on my potential purchases too.
Here you go. As long as you are an OEM with the appropriate licenses, insurance, and tax id #, I’m sure you can temporarily import whatever you want.
Great. Now how do I convince Stellantis to hire me as their new CEO?
It’s a lot of work to drive some forbidden fruit.
There’s the golden parachute too.
I forget what it’s called, but you can get a 1 year exemption from the NHTSA (IIRC from about 20 years ago) for about anything. Not sure how it’s registered, but that’s a state issue. As far as the feds are concerned, at the end of a year, you have to prove to them that it has been destroyed or exported out of the country. That’s my guess as to why he’ll have to give it up, but being a manufacturer, they may have their own separate channels they use. When I was in Detroit, I’d see contemporary non-US stuff like a Lancia Kappa driving around on manufacturer plates.
Fine by me as long as the cost of whatever toy I get to drive is coming out of someone else’s pocket.
There’s a loophole that allows non-federalized imports for show, testing and competition – but it cannot be licensed for use on public roads, although can be used on public roads if integral to the above purposes. A bond must be paid up front, a bunch of forms filed, and it must be exported within 12 months.
https://www.cbp.gov/trade/basic-import-export/importing-car
So here’s the plan:
Step 1:Start a “car company”
Step 2: Use investor money to import a fuckton of “samples”
Step 3: Maintain a constant rotation of “samples”.
Step 4: Get fired for gross negligence, inappropriate behavior and embezzling investor money, collect massive golden parachute+hush money, immediately get hired at another car company,
Rinse repeat
I’m looking for investors, interested?
I’m down – make me your Chief Compliance Officer, and I’ll do all the filings.
I’ll just need a Mercedes-AMG C63 S E Performance T (wagon) to start…
It’s legal with M-plates for up to either six months or a year, I forget which. It’s how I was able to borrow the C307 RS once or twice back when I was on the program in Dearborn ten years ago.
Looks like a McLaren Panamera 6. Not bad if I do say so.
I like the things that Jim says and does (at least publicly). Ford has nailed a couple of new products (Mav and Bronco(s)), put a respectable first effort in to the Mach E and Lightning, and they’ve been quietly making Lincoln more competitive. That being said, I don’t know if Jim, or anyone other than Elon, has the resources and clout to make EVs truly competitive against the Chinese. It’s more than just a skunkworks. It’s building up the very base layer of the EV supply and development chains. EVs are shaking out differently than ICE. Imagine everyone had coal powered steam cars, and the first ICE manufacturer was an oil baron with patents up the wazoo for gasoline refinement. It is all about the batteries.
I’m not interested in that type of vehicle, but when reading this article, what bothered me is that Ford’s CEO gets to drive a car, within the USA, that is pretty much off-limits to regular people who may be interested in getting one. That sort of stinks.
I was thinking the exact same thing. 25 year import ban be damned.
“That sort of stinks.”
What do you expect from the founder of a Skunkworks?
Are people actually surprised that the USA has the regulatory mechanism for a car company to import competing products for research purposes, or is this just the meme-reaction of the moment?
I imagine he’s got some workaround where he can slap manufacturer plates on it which I believe are allowed to circumnavigate the typical requirements. I honestly don’t really have a problem with a handful of people having that opportunity. Now if it was hundreds of people getting that special treatment, I’d be pretty annoyed.
I do in this case because the person in question is someone who not only greatly benefits from the rule but has the political sway to get rid of it.
Might be show & display (perhaps under technological significance – research, benchmarking etc) but thats also another example of a select few getting to drive something everyone else cant.
He’s only been driving it for six months. Anyone can do this on a temporary basis for, according to the NHTSA, “specified purposes, including research, investigations, demonstrations or training, or competitive racing events.” The only difference is that a manufacturer doesn’t need to ask for an NHTSA permission letter each time. There’s a summary here under item fifteen:
https://www.nhtsa.gov/importing-vehicle/importation-and-certification-faqs
There is nothing stopping him and Ford from building such a car, but with a real V8 engine, because Callahan Auto Parts of Sandusky, Ohio doesn’t manufacture nor sell anything for electric vehicles.
“Fat guy in a little coat”
Yeah I actually think this is pretty smart. Poor old Roger Smith probably drove an Electra, and Lido surely had several of his Edsel-grade Sinatra Imperials. In both cases, the old guard gets a Stuart Smalley-like “I’m doing a good job” reassurance, with disastrous effects.
Farley has the right idea. It’s not enough to spend a few minutes sampling the competition- you need to live with the car to really get to know it.
Roger drove all sorts of cars. I know this because my old man worked at GM at that time, as well. He would get a different car every few weeks to use. Sometimes they were foreign, other times they were pre-production GM cars. One that sticks out to me because I remember how much the “infotainment” screen blew me away was the Toronado. Plus, the car talked!
It was pretty much corporate policy to fleet swap for “reviews” for all the fellas working upstairs at the GM Building in Detroit.
Oh sure, but like I said “test drives” are not particularly helpful. You really need at least a couple of weeks to suss out a car.
Right. Which is what the timeframe was. We might have had a car for 10 days or 2 months. It depended on things I was too young to know or care about.
It probably would be a good idea if some of the engineers and design people did this too. It’s ok so long as your personal cars that you own are from your employer.
What did he like about the Xiaomi specifically?
In China these things offer Taycan performance at Tesla prices, but there are numerous reports of build quality being utter shite because its development was rushed through and costs were cut.
Not sure where you’re from but in the US nobody cares about quality. Look at all the Nissans being sold. If we cared about quality, we’d pay for it.
This is the land of the disposable everything. All we care about is that it looks good for a little while and costs as little as possible. That way we can throw it away after it gets a dent and go get a new one.
The fuck are you talking about?
The average age of the US vehicle fleet is like 14 years old now
I mean with the CT Tesla offers Taycan prices or more and at the new low point of Tesla quality.
“Skunk works bla bla beat the competition bibidy bibidy..we’re going to win yada yada..”.
From the people who bring you the Mach E and other steaming piles like the Ecosport…
Kinda hard to buy the mumbo jumbo.
They finger-fucked the US market for years with profit bags like the F150, and now they are ripe for picking by anyone who makes a practical vehicle for a reasonable price.
***Ford Maverick has entered the chat.
The Maverick they purposely underproduced for its first two years? The one with 5+ recalls?
You asked for a practical vehicle for a reasonable price. The Maverick is that; it’s an incredibly compelling multitool of a vehicle. They vastly underestimated the demand for the first couple of years.
I love my Maverick, but quality is somewhere around Job 17.
Yeah. The recalls are annoying, but most aren’t a huge deal. The biggest issue is plastic that scratches easily and crap CV axles outside of the Tremors.
Mine has had 7 recalls… so far. The Maverick in all its forms is up to 12 as of the last time I checked a few days ago.
Aren’t basically all of the complaints about the Mach E about the Mustang branding, where the reviews tend to agree that it’s at least decent at what it’s trying to be, if not class leading?
Ecosport is awful, but also a discontinued Hail Mary from 7 years ago. Shocked they haven’t brought the Puma over though.
The Mach-E is a perfectly cromulent electric Ford Edge. Drove one for a little while. It’s nice enough, but that’s about it. It is absolutely an car.
I’m thinking Ford needs to focus on making quality Job 1 for a change. My wife’s 3yo Escape PHEV is on it’s 4th (5th?) recall… My ’19 Bolt had one, our ’17 Leaf has had zero.
Agreed. The customer is always their beta tester. Good luck to anyone with that sweet 3 cylinder that’s chewing up timing belts.
6 months seems like a lot, maybe he has it in a rotation with other competitor cars and their own(hopefully), and I would think that would be the way to go, drive the Mach-e GT one day, the Xiaomi the next to think, “huh I liked the way this worked yesterday” or, “dang the one yesterday couldn’t do this.”
If it’s just, I like this car and am gonna drive it until you make a better one, don’t think that’s the best use of his ability to drive whatever he wants to get a sense of competition. Sounds like he just likes a fast EV Sedan and they don’t make one and he doesn’t want to be seen in a Model S Plaid so got something flown in for ‘testing’.
Makes sense to do this right? If I ran a company and we identified a clear threat to our future, I’d want my leadership team to understand it.
Not just the CEO, I’d want other leaders to be doing the same thing. And get a few cars for the engineering department (or this “Skunk Works”) to be picking apart. I’d find it hard to believe they don’t have a team of engineers that is just dedicated to looking at the competition.
But again, it should be no surprise that the Chinese have managed to build a competitive car at this point. Ford themselves have had a state-owned company building Fords and Lincolns for over a decade. No shit, they learned something.
With the videos I’ve seen of the SU7 failing…good luck to him.
Seems like he likes his so his doesn’t…
Xiaomi can make at least one that works!
Xiaomi: This one is going to America, make sure it is the best one we’ve ever built. We don’t want to start out with a black eye like Vinfast.
Pretty sure Yugo said exactly that 40 years ago.
If you’d have asked me then I’d have said that Jim Farley was driving a BYD Seal based on the headline image…
Hopefully, whatever they come up with has an interior that is more appealing to sit in than a music festival porta potty. This TV-on-a-bulky-wall-mount sticking out of the dash trend is horrible aesthetically, ergonomically, and long term and the rest of the interior is more boring than an eternally damned adrenaline junkie’s personal circle of hell (trust me on that one—I don’t just guard the entrance). Outside is actually pretty nice. A bunch of pieces of other cars can be picked out of it, but I think it works.
I do not want a screen in my car for any other use than sat-nav and then I would like it to go away when I don’t need a map. Touchscreens and me do not get along well. I have a tremor in my fingers that makes them basically unusable, funny, the tremor gets worse when I am stressed and something that stresses me? Yup. An infuriating feedback loop that touchscreens set up. If a car has to have the infernal things then I will set stuff like seats and hvac once. I do not need to faff with those again. For obvious reasons I do not use spotify or it’s ilk, my brief flirtation with a smartphone left me listening to either Daft Punk or Bread, with some random Stravinsky thrown in. I can be a 64 year old adrenaline junkie but I do not want to be over stimulated by the inside of a car.Annoyingly I have recently been driving just such a car but I had to give it back. Because I do not have £390,000 to spend on a new car and because I do not want another mahoosive tank. The car was an RR Spectre, will other carmakers take note, this is how you make a dashboard. It even had a physical switch that hid all the silly screens with one click and a Saab like night mode, Just you, a speedometer and the road. I could rant more but I have to be up in the morning to receive a 2008 Skoda Octavia.
Probably a sign of my age, but after watching a few videos on it, that RR seems pretty damn sweet.
That’s another good point about the negatives of the touchscreens for people with fine motor control issues, tremors, maybe even fake limbs as I don’t think the screens would register from the touch of one. Maybe the ADA should take up the case against them.
The RR was possibly the nicest car I have ever experienced, but it is really really big. I say this as someone whose day to day car is frankly ridiculous.
I will take your brilliant suggestion on, in the UK we do not have a direct equivalent of the ADA but you have given me ideas that I shall follow. Thank you.
How’s the visibility? I prefer small vehicles, but do have a fondness for wafting beasts and I’ve only ever experienced old Cadillacs and other American land yachts that fit that description.
Not good, I am used to cars that I can see out of, the RR was better than some but my 1934 weymann bodied car is better. I have very high standards though, RO80. Rover P6 and Citroen DS are sort of benchmarks!
yeah, not a big fan of the screenorama of late
Hmph… surprised that Xiaomei would lean so heavily in the touchscreen direction when designing a car. I did not see that coming.
It’s not surprising, I’m expressing the wish that Ford—the “they” referred to which is in regards to the article above where Farley says he is inspired by this thing to have Ford build something to compete—doesn’t follow suit with the touchscreen and terrible interior. These are details rather than having to do with the whole picture, but as he doesn’t really say much about what so impresses him specifically, that left the door open to air my grievance with the garbage interior design of many EVs.
Ford has been here before, his first week on the job, Alan Mulally told a room full of employees he drove a Lexus LS because if was the best car in the world, in that case everyone just kind of stared at him
And, over at GM, John DeLorean was notorious for exclusively driving various Italian sports cars throughout his time at Pontiac and Chevrolet
Mulally was also responsible for things like the Taurus when it came back, so I’m not sure that guy actually knew what a good car was.
He knew what a good brand was, people recognized Taurus, they didn’t know WTF Five Hundred was supposed to be
Still makes you wonder if he ever said, “This is the best we can do?” when they were developing the 6th generation.
Plus, it’s still surprising to me that so many people forgot the where 500 came from. Ford used it for years on Galaxies and Fairlines (which is where Ford pulled it from), as well as the Torino and Custom.
I thinks because the 500 trim level was an increasingly obscure reference by the 2000s, and switching it from numbers to letters to fit the “F” name theme also threw people a little
Was sort of an aborted story arc, the Fusion was supposed to have been the Futura, so both their mainstream sedans would have been named after 1960s trim levels, but Pep Boys blocked them from using that one.
200 better than a Chrysler.
I bet they’ve stripped it down and rebuilt it half a dozen times. Well, more like another identical car. This one seems to be for “durability testing”.
Flying your company’s flag by only driving/being driven in their top tier products is how the Detroit 2.5 got into their current situation. Everything is rosy when in a rose garden!
I’d argue it hasn’t helped much, either, since their top tier products are still noticeably behind the competition, in everything except maybe pickups. Which, granted, is pretty much all they’re interested in building now, anyway
LOL that’s ironic given Ford’s parking policy, making non-Ford/non-UAW cars park miles away.
Protectionist shit that insulates them from the competition they need to compete.
Also funny that Farley has Toyota on his resume, yet Ford seems to have learned NOTHING from them. That’s OK, GM also learned nothing from Toyota/NUMMI. He couldn’t recruit laid-off/bought-out Toyota/Honda engineers and other employees
Join the UNECE standards, drop the childish chicken tax and the stupid Detroit parking policies (all three of them do it).
Ford had to pay 25% for each Transit Connect cargo van, but they never bothered to lobby to repeal that shit. The cost of lobbying to repeal it would’ve been far less than what they had to pay.
Ford never lobbied to repeal the chicken tax because they don’t want it repealed. The Transit Connect Cargo van market was so very small it simply wasn’t worth the effort. They just wanted to bend the rule for one product line, and ended up losing pretty much all their profits and then some when they were forced to pay the correct import duties on sales from day one.
For those who don’t know, Ford shipped all Transit Connects in with seats classified as passenger vans, paid a 2.5% duty on them, and then stripped many of them back to cargo vans, thinking they would avoid the higher 25% duty rate.
Ford paid a penalty when the government reclassified those trucks as the cargo vans they really were. Ford paid $365 million in back import duties because they were facing a fine of $1.3 billion or more if they litigated the case and lost.
$365 million in lobbying would not be enough to repeal the chicken tax. Ford just wanted to change the rules for just one truck line.
Ford, GM and Chrysler are all terrified of what would happen to their full-sized truck market cash cows if the chicken tax were repealed, so even if Ford pursued that self-destructive policy, the other two would pile on twice as hard against repeal. There’s no reason at all for them to want repeal; motivation for that has to come from either other companies, or come from us as consumers.
I doubt they’d advocate repeal, but I don’t think they’re all that worried. Brand loyalty is still a much bigger factor in the truck market and even though both Toyota and Nissan build their full-sized models here, they haven’t had much of an effect. Nissan’s giving up after pretty obvious failure; and while Toyota’s Tundra sales are more than just a rounding error to the Big 3, they still don’t build large trucks that are as appealing as domestics or have anywhere near the sales volume. This is the only large and highly developed market where large pickups make much sense for either commercial or personal use, which gives domestic automakers a huge advantage in product design.
Brand loyalty wouldn’t mean much at all if competitive trucks were available for half the price of a domestic. Those stripped trucks sold in Pacific Rim countries aren’t imported because of the chicken tax.
Upgrades to mall-crawler style trucks are popular in large part because the base models are so pricey. If there were a basic, no-frills midsizer available at around half the cost of a Ford F-150, it would take a huge bite of the domestic truck market.
The chicken tax also keeps auto makers out. Trucks would be a great entry point to the US market because the safety and EPA requirements are easier to pass. Establish a foothold with a decent truck, it everything else can come after.
FYI, that parking policy is a UAW policy not a Ford or GM or Chyrsler policy. I see tons of non Fords at work and we park wherever. Only at the plants do they care, and only in certain parking lots of those plants.
This, on the other hand, is accurate. On my second day on the job at Dearborn back in 2012, I was told to take a Focus with an M-plate to MAP and not the Jetta that I was driving at the time because it wouldn’t be perceived awesomely. Sure enough, every non-Ford badge I saw there was parked somewhere between the exit gate and the Ypsilanti airport.
My 2010 Mazda6 was built at Flatrock, but I never risked it when I worked at DTP. I just parked in the back. It was easier to get out anyways, so I didn’t mind.
Good for the ol’ step count, as well.
>>>LOL that’s ironic given Ford’s parking policy, making non-Ford/non-UAW cars park miles away.
As a guy who drove a Subaru to the Ford lot for a summer, that policy is apocryphal at best.
Subaru: the other blue oval LOL
It’s quite interesting that a first car from Xiaomi can be so well rounded that even after six months Farley is still impressed. Chinese manufacturers are now well into the next gear of worldwide exports.
To be fair, they are probably leaving the mechanicals and programming for those bits to BAIC who builds the car for them.
China is really, really good at making consumer electronics. It’s not a surprise that’s translating to electric vehicles.