Ford CEO Has Been Driving Xiaomi EV For 6 Months And ‘He Doesn’t Want To Give It Up’

Ford CEO Jim Farley said in a recent podcast interview that he was driving an electric car made by Chinese electronics company Xiaomi and “didn’t want to give it up.” The model, the Xiaomi SU7, looks similar to the Porsche Panamera sedan and starts at around $30,300, while the top variant will cost around $42,100.

“This Xiaomi car… is very nice. “They sell ten thousand, twenty thousand a month,” Farley said. “I don’t like to talk too much about the tournament, but we flew [an SU7] I’m going from Shanghai to Chicago and I’ve been driving it for six months now, and I don’t want to stop.”

Farley didn’t say which version of the SU7 he’s importing, but it’s common practice for automakers to check out their competitors’ cars to better understand what they’re up against. Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe recently said he found out that his vans were being demolished by car manufacturers in China.

Xiaomi is well known for making smartphones and was once called the “Apple of China” for its rapid growth in the market there. It trails Huawei today but remains a major player in the Chinese smartphone market. It also sells a range of other electronics including TVs and smart speakers that can work together within the Xiaomi ecosystem.

It may seem strange at first that a handset maker would enter the electric vehicle market, but it is not unusual when you consider that BYD, one of the largest EV manufacturers in China, has started making batteries for companies such as Motorola. Electric cars are, in effect, smartphones on wheels – the hardest challenge for carmakers to overcome has been battery availability and price.

The SU7 is fully integrated with other Xiaomi products, so you can remotely control home appliances in the car, for example. The front has a 16.1-inch infotainment screen with a smartphone screen and Xiaomi Pilot, its driver assistance software. The car can go from 0 to 62mph in 2.7 seconds, beating the Tesla Model 3’s time of 3.1 seconds. Xiaomi says the standard model gets 435 miles per charge, though that number may be unreliable.

Chinese companies have been able to achieve what Ford and Tesla couldn’t—produce cheap electric cars that actually make money—thanks to the Chinese Communist Party’s EV-friendly policies, access to battery raw materials, and overall domestic scale. car market. The goal appears to be to unseat the US as the world’s dominant player in the future of automobiles and increase China’s soft power abroad. BYD, which sometime in 2023 will overtake Tesla as the world’s largest electric car maker, has been focusing on growth in developing markets, boosting them with affordable EVs and opening factories in places like Brazil.

Unfortunately, due to the country’s problems, the American market is closed to Chinese car manufacturers at the moment, and no group seems to be interested in changing that. Back in September, the Biden administration implemented a 100% tariff on Chinese electric cars sold in the US, even though no Chinese automaker sells cars here.

Still, one of China’s cheapest EVs, the BYD Seagull EV, starts at just $9,700—so factoring in the prices, $20,000 for an electric car with a limited range of 190 miles isn’t bad at all. They’re sold in Mexico as the BYD Dolphin Mini, so you can drive down south and grab one, although it costs closer to $20,000 USD there—still a good deal.

Ford has been struggling along with other US automakers to get its EV business off the ground. EV sales haven’t slowed, but growth has slowed and popular brands have been quick to scale back their ambitions as they slowly grow to profitability. Ford recently canceled a three-row electric SUV and delayed an electric pickup truck until 2027. The company reported a $1.3 billion loss in its Model e EV segment in the first quarter of 2024 and a $1.1 billion loss in the second.

Tesla is the only company that has been able to turn a profit in EVs stateside, but CEO Elon Musk said in an earnings call this week that the company will not release a $25,000 car as many had hoped. The company’s sales will be roughly flat in 2024, a far cry from the 50% year-over-year growth Musk predicted not long ago. Musk hopes that growth will return to 20 to 30% by 2025, but the company still sells far fewer cars than companies like Toyota.

Ultimately, building electric vehicles requires a large upfront investment and years of patience to see a return. There’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem—selling more affordable EVs requires a significant scale to bring costs down, but selling more EVs requires the cars to be, you know, affordable to enough people. Trump has said that if he becomes president again, he will reduce tax credits and other incentives that support the EV industry. Don’t expect cheap Chinese EVs like the Xiaomi SU7 in the US anytime soon.