I keep thinking about a particular scene from Jim Farley’s most recent interviews. In a Dearborn workshop, Ford engineers are disassembling a Tesla Model Y alongside a Ford Mustang Mach-E, weighing parts, and measuring wire by wire as he describes a teardown. The Mach-E’s wiring harness weighed seventy pounds more than Tesla’s. 1.3 kilometers more. That’s not a detail for a battery-powered car, where every kilogram reduces range and every gram costs money. That’s a decision.
It’s what Farley refers to as the “lucid moment.” It’s also the most succinct explanation of Detroit’s mistakes regarding EVs that any current auto CEO has made public. The majority of his colleagues continue to spin. Sitting in an office in Dearborn that has been filled with sixty years of corporate optimism, Farley has made a decision that is less common in this field: public admission. “These were kind of designed the wrong way,” he said in April on the Rapid Response podcast. If you disregard the attached dollar amount, the understatement is almost comical. Through 2027, Ford has written down about $19 billion in EV assets. Just last year, the Model E division suffered a $4.8 billion loss.
Prejudice is a recurring theme in Farley’s interviews. In the engineering sense, not the social one. He claims that Ford created the first generation of EVs. the manner in which it had spent 120 years designing combustion vehicles. Purchase the wiring harness from your current vendor. Utilize the sections that you have already verified. Allow the platform to inherit presumptions that no one had to challenge. That was not the history of Tesla. Neither do BYD, Xiaomi, or the numerous Chinese automakers that surfaced during the COVID-19 pandemic while executives from Ford and GM were confined to their living rooms. The distance had grown to a chasm by the time Farley and his vice chair, John Lawler, returned to a Beijing auto show. “Jim, holy crap. Lawler stated, “We are really far behind.” That has also become an enduring quote from Farley.
He has made it clear that Tesla is not the Chinese threat. It’s BYD, which has been producing EVs for 20 years, vertically integrated down to its own cargo ships, with state subsidies that, according to him, are worth $5,000 to $7,000 per vehicle. According to reports, Farley test-drew a Xiaomi SU7 sedan and refused to return it. According to him, their vehicles cost a third as much as a Porsche Taycan with equivalent performance. An American CEO publicly endorsing the automobiles his industry is attempting to keep out of the nation has a subtle but noteworthy quality.
The Universal EV Platform, a clean-sheet architecture due in 2027 that begins with a mid-size electric pickup priced at about $30,000, is Ford’s response to all of this. Farley has likened the reorganization of the Louisville factory to the original Model T assembly line. Less expensive motors, fewer parts, and smaller batteries. Instead of being an aspirational vehicle, it is an EV reimagined as a vehicle for working people. The company’s survival depends on whether consumers prefer a $30,000 Ford EV over a $50,000 one.
Observing Farley speak, it seems as though he is competing against more than just China. He is up against a culture at his own company that produced $75,000 trucks because they were profitable and thought the same reasoning applied to EVs. It didn’t. “The customer has spoken,” he told Yahoo Finance quite bluntly. Whether Ford can respond quickly enough is still up for debate.