Outside of Elon Musk, it’s hard to find a more outspoken car company executive than Jim Farley, who has led Ford since the turn of the decade and is overseeing its response to the threat of the Chinese car industry.
Farley has praised China’s vehicles as “humbling” and “superior” to those from Western brands, while also warning the nation’s industry is similar to the growth enjoyed by Japan but “on steroids”.
Now the executive has once again sounded the alarm bell, this time speaking to US program Fox and Friends about the possibility of Chinese cars being imported to the US.
“The Chinese have huge direct support for their auto companies – there are over 100 of them, and the places they have imported [to] – their local market [China] is 29 million, [but] their capacity in the country for making cars is over 50 million,” Farley said.
“They have enough capacity in China to cover all the manufacturing, all the vehicle sales in the United States.
“We should not let them into our country. Manufacturing is the heart and soul of our country and for us to lose that to those exports would be devastating for our country.
“That doesn’t even include the cyber and privacy risks of a Chinese vehicle. All the vehicles have 10 cameras, they can collect a lot of data. There’s no way this is a fair fight.
“Ford has to do our part to make our vehicles competitive with the Chinese – and I think we have with our new affordable EVs coming out, made in Kentucky – but this is not a fair fight, and it should have a big impact on the US.”
Since 2024, Chinese-made EVs have been subject to a 100 per cent tariff in the US, making them financially unviable to be sold in the nation, though reports have circulated since that some brands were looking to build across the border in Mexico to skirt the higher taxes.
Ironically, earlier this year a report by the Financial Times, citing word from insider sources, claimed Ford wanted to help Chinese smartphone giant-turned-EV-producer Xiaomi enter the US market.
According to the report, this would see Ford assist with producing Xiaomi’s cars in the US, something which is as-yet unheard of for a Chinese brand.
While Ford and Xiaomi both denied the report – with the Blue Oval brand going as far to say it was “completely false” – Bloomberg later issued a different report, claiming Farley discussed the potential of a joint venture with members of the Trump Administration.
Insiders claimed the joint ventures would result in Ford – or any other US carmakers willing to make such a move – holding the controlling stake in the partnership, similar to what China’s car industry already requires from outside manufacturers.
In China, carmakers have been required to enter a joint venture with local brands for the best part of three decades, resulting in some ‘Western’ OEMs setting up multiple partnerships to utilise different factories.
US President Donald Trump has recently said around the same time that if Chinese brands “want to come in and build a plant and hire you and hire your friends and your neighbours, that’s great, I love that”, representing a major change of tune compared to recent approaches.
Though Farley has often warned of the threat China poses to the US automotive industry, he had an EV made in the rival nation imported to the US in 2024.
“I don’t like talking about the competition so much, but I drive the Xiaomi,” Farley said on the Fully Charged podcast in 2024.
“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.
“For a company like Ford, [the rise of China’s auto industry] has been something we’ve been watching for a while, but I’ve had two trips to China the last two years that were literally epiphanies.
“The last one was about the Xiaomi product. In the West, our cell phone companies don’t have car companies. But in China, both Huawei and Xiaomi, the two biggest cell phone companies, are inside of every vehicle that is made.”
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