Ford Executive Declares America Lacking in Electric Vehicle Technology Compared to China
According to Bill Ford Jr., the Executive Chairman of Ford Motor Co., the United States is not yet fully equipped to rival China in the manufacturing of electric vehicles. He also mentioned that his company is adopting an all-inclusive strategy to get ready for the competition.
“They developed very quickly, and they’ve developed them on a large scale, and now they’re taking,” Ford said in an interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS. “They’re not here, but they’re going to be here in our opinion at some point and we’ve got to be ready, and we’re getting ready.”
China is poised to become the world’s second-largest exporter of passenger vehicles, potentially reshaping the global auto industry and undermining the dominance of its auto trading partners and competitors. Shipments of cars made in China to foreign countries have tripled since 2020 and were over 2.5 million last year, challenging traditional car exporters such as Germany.
Ford announced this year that it would invest $3.5 billion in an electric vehicle battery factory in Michigan, sparking political controversy by saying it will operate the technology and China’s Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Ltd. with support.
U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg addressed the challenge in a Bloomberg television interview on Sunday, saying the U.S. must take action to reduce China’s lead in electric vehicle batteries and that building refining capacity for key materials is “demonstrable.”
The U.S. needs to make sure it “sets on an economically sound, environmentally sound, geopolitically sound approach to how we get these vital elements of our economy that are only going to grow in importance,” Buttigieg said.
Ford, the grandson of founder Henry Ford, said he saw an opportunity for Ford engineers to understand technology.
“We just license the technology,” he said. “It’s really important that our engineers get this information so that we can eventually do it ourselves.”
Ford dismissed the idea that U.S. manufacturing would force prices up, arguing that making things in America is important and that manufacturing jobs have a multiplier effect that can lead to a stronger economy.
“When you start going down the cost curve and you start going up the production curve, costs go down, and they’re going down even as we sit here,” Ford said.
China is already heavily involved in electric cars in Europe, where the vehicles sold in China are mostly electric models from Tesla Inc. Former European brands owned in China, such as Volvo and MG, as well as other models such as Dacia Spring or BMW iX3, are also produced exclusively in China.
