Ford’s Answer to China: A Completely New Way of Making Cars

Farley thinks that Ford’s new way of making EVs is the perfect weapon to take on the Chinese automakers, the ideal example of precisely how the West needs to compete. “You’ve got the BYD model: 700,000 employees, 200,000 powertrain engineers. How do you beat them?” asks Farley. “Turns out, Doug and Alan and the team built a propulsion system that was like Apollo 13, managed down to the watt so that our battery could be so much smaller than BYD’s. Their cost advantage on vertical integration on the battery is offset by innovation in the powertrain. We can’t beat them on scale. We can’t beat them on vertical integration. But we can beat them on innovation.”