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, XiaomiÂ
“I’m doing secret market research” is a pretty good cover for “I want to drive this as we don’t make anything near as good”
Yeah, since Ford=Fix Or Repair Daily